Friday, May 08, 2009

General Ramey and His Memo

Let’s talk about this idea that Brigadier General Roger Ramey, a career officer who had spent his whole life dealing with classified information, would allow a civilian photographer to accidently photograph a classified document. This is the idea behind attempts to read and understand what is now known as the "Ramey Document."

First, let’s note that if it can be accurately read, and if the interpretations put on it by those who have studied it are correct, then this is the smoking gun. Here is a document with a known provenance, held by a general, and dated to July 8, 1947. We have everything we need to prove that the document is real. Something that can’t be said about so many of the documents circulating in the UFO community today.

Let’s now ignore the various interpretations put on the document because they are unimportant to this discussion. We’ll agree that some of it can be easily read and other parts of it require a great deal of interpretation to make anything sensible out of them.

Instead, let’s look at what we know about this and see if we can’t, if not come to a consensus, at least understand the other side of the argument.

We know that the photographs were taken by J. Bond Johnson, who, at that time, worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. We know that he went out to the air base and made his way to Ramey’s office. I would suggest that he was escorted but only because I can’t see them allowing a civilian to wander around the building unescorted, especially if he was going to see the general. In other words, he would not have been left alone in the office, but that too is an argument for another time.

According to Johnson he posed Ramey and took a picture or two of him. Johnson said that he handed a paper to Ramey so that he had something in his hand, though I don’t know why he would have done that (Ramey, holding the document, and DuBose sitting in the chair seen here). If that is true, the message on the paper is irrelevant because it would be the preliminary newspaper story and we all know what that was about. It would have provided the original information about the find but nothing that had been confirmed.

At other times, it was suggested that the paper was something that came from Ramey’s desk. If that is true, then the message might be of great importance, though I suppose you could make the same argument, that is, that the information contained is preliminary and of no great importance, especially since Ramey allowed himself to be photographed holding it. Again, that should be left to the interpretations which is another discussion altogether.

This is the point where we begin to argue that Ramey would not have breached security in such a fashion but in today’s world, we are subjected to a number of stories of important government leaders inadvertently revealing highly-classified information to cameras. One of those cited is McGeorge Bundy, who, while a member of the Johnson Administration was photographed carrying a top secret document and revealed the code word (UMBRA) that went with it.

Recently a British minister visiting No. 10 Downing Street was photographed carrying a document that was clearly classified. Inspection of the photograph revealed some of it’s classified message.

But in both these instances, neither man was a military officer. They were of what I think of as the political elite and both had the attitude that the rules didn’t apply to them. They couldn’t be bothered with most common of rules about classified material, which was a simple cover sheet.

So, had this document been classified, it would have been under a cover sheet when taken from the message center to Ramey’s office. When Johnson came into Ramey’s office, Ramey would have covered the document (if it was not already covered) so that someone without the proper clearances couldn’t have seen it.

The next question should be, where was Ramey’s aide. The aide would not be very far from the general, and one of his jobs would have been to ensure that such a breach of security didn’t happen. True, there is no mention of Ramey’s aide in any of the discussions, but then the aide is pretty much like furniture... you don’t mention the desk or chairs, but you know they were in the room.

We do know that Ramey’s Chief of Staff, Thomas DuBose, was in the room and I wonder, if the document was classified, why he didn’t say anything about it. I remember any number of incidents, while I was in the military, in which one officer, or even enlisted man, suggested that we all be careful with the classified material, making sure there were cover sheets on them to prevent inadvertent revelation and exposure. Both Ramey and DuBose would have been trained in dealing with classified and I find it difficult to believe that they would have made this mistake.

Which is not to say that they wouldn’t have made such a mistake, only that it is extremely unlikely and citing examples from the civilian world doesn’t really make the point.

What we are left with here, in this specific argument, are the facts as related by Johnson... or rather, the statements made by Johnson, one of which is that he had brought the paper into Ramey’s office with him.

Forgetting that, we have no evidence of Ramey’s aide in this little adventure, but he shouldn’t have been far from the general’s side, and he should have stopped Ramey from holding a classified document while the civilian photographer was in the office. This is, of course, speculation based on no testimony that the aide was in the office at the time.

DuBose, as Chief of Staff, should have stopped Ramey from holding a classified document during the photography. He would have recognized the document as classified but he said nothing about it in any of the interviews conducted with him.

There should have been a cover sheet on it, based on the procedures for dealing with classified documents and there is no evidence, in the photograph of such a cover sheet.

Where does that leave us? In this argument, to this point, all examples of highly classified documents that have been inadvertently photographed are of civilians making the errors. And we have seen them making some incredible mistakes. But we have nothing to show high-ranking military officers making similar mistakes, and even if we find those, it doesn’t prove that Ramey made such a mistake.

In the end, all we know is that J. Bond Johnson took photographs of Brigadier General Roger Ramey and Ramey was holding a piece of paper. We can read some of the document easily but not other parts. There is nothing on the document to suggest that it was classified, but the way the paper is held and the angle of the photograph might have precluded those images from being photographed.

And that is really all we know about this. We could argue interpretation. We could argue relevance. But all we know is that Ramey was holding a document. Johnson said it was his idea to put something into Ramey’s hand. And we can read some of what is on the document. Other than that, we are into speculation and interpretation.

For those interested in more information, just type Ramey Memo into your search engine and take a look at David Rudiak’s interpretation.

First, if Johnson really gave Ramey the paper, the claims that this paper is the "smoking gun" are dead in the water. No civilian would ever be given an open classified document to take to a general. If there is the slightest chance that this sheet is indeed top secret (and to do with ETs) Johnson's claim to have handled it must surely be false. This casts some doubt on the rest of his testimony.

Second, Ramey took part in the famous press conference in Washington in late July 1952 after the dual radar-visual sightings during that month. Therefore, if the "Ramey knew the secret" proponents are right, Ramey sat through this conference, keeping others in the dark, whilst knowing the great truth for the previous 5 years, yet kept his mouth shut about it. A likely scenario!

Shortly after that the Battelle Institute and the Robertson Committee began their extensive study of UFOs (at the request of the USAF & CIA), but again, these two never had the opportunity of talking to Ramey, the man who had known the answer since 1947. So I ask you Kevin: is this scenario really credible?

I submit that those few who still cling to this fast fading hope of finding the telltale 'hard evidence' have a totally lost cause. Yes, that includes David Rudiak.

Unless I missed something the idea of the press conference was to minimize what happened as being nothing but a "weather balloon" nothing secret.. To bring attention to anything out of the ordinary with the press in the room would have been the real breach of security. Ramey was a seasoned officer to say the least, he dealt with the press before, but I am sure he never dealt with a space ship before. There would have been the giggle factor which could be used as a very effective tool. All in all I think that Ramey played it just right. In the end there was no follow up by the press that was exactly what they wanted to achieve.And many UFO researchers even today will write as if the Ramey paper was within in a vacuum, not part of the hundreds of witnesses which indicate a very effective lock down. Joseph CappUFO Media MattersNon-Commercial Blog

Excuse the length of this rebuttal, a blog in itself, but it takes time to detail the many flaws in Kevin’s argument.

Kevin can’t seem to let go of this logically circuitous argument which he has used many times in the past: This document can’t be important or classified because Ramey would never have held a classified document while a photographer was in the room or allowed it to be photographed. In other words, it couldn’t happen because… well it couldn’t happen.

This is pure debunkery putting Kevin in league with Phil Klass and others, who have used variations of the same argument.

By the same flawed logic, also put out by various debunkers, Roswell couldn’t have been an alien crash because military guys like Marcel would never have shown his family the debris, Oliver Henderson would never have talked to his friends and family, provost martial Easley would never have admitted to the things he did with Kevin or talked to his family, etc., etc. Kevin has rightfully argued in the past that these arguments are bogus, but doesn’t seem to realize he is employing the same invalid reasoning against the Ramey memo.

When I provide counterexamples, such as Pres. Johnson’s national security advisor and last month the UK’s head of counterterrorism allowing highly classified material to be photographed by civilian photographers (and you would think THEY would have some awareness of security issues), Kevin again shifts the argument. Well, they were mere civilians, whereas a military officer follows strict protocol and would never have allowed this to happen. And had he been so careless, Col. Dubose or Ramey’s invisible aide in the room (even though photographer Johnson has also said there was nobody else in the room at the time) would have gang-tackled him and ripped the offending document from his clenched fist. Yeah right!

I have three more examples of major security breaches by people who should have known better. President Carter (a former naval officer on a nuclear submarine BTW) revealed development of the stealth airplane during the 1980 campaign. Sec. of Defense Lewis Johnson carelessly blurted out development of the supersecret hydrogen bomb to newsman Drew Pearson in 1950 (Pearson quickly made it headline news).

But since Kevin is arguing military officers are somehow exempt from such flaws, how about this example, an active duty general, Eisenhower’s personal friend and classmate from West Point, Gen. Henry Miller, chief supply officer of the Ninth Army Air Force? The two biggest secrets of D-Day were where and when it was going to happen. Eisenhower was understandably paranoid to the extreme that this was going to leak out and put extraordinary security measures into effect to prevent it. So what did Gen. Miller do? He went to a cocktail party in April and started blurting out all his supply headaches would be over by June 15 after D-Day. Then to compound his slip, he started taking bets as to when D-Day would begin in June. Eisenhower heard about Miller’s indiscretion the next day, demoted his friend and classmate to Colonel, and shipped him back to the States.

But by Kevin’s logic, either this event never happened, even if it did, because a General would follow clear protocol and never, ever allow this to happen. Or, if he did blurt this out, it couldn’t have been important, because, well, a General would never blurt out something important. And even if the tipsy Gen. Miller did blurt it out, some ever-present aide or other officer there would have jumped in and gagged him.

What about Ramey? Did he break security? In all four photos of Ramey, Ramey is holding the paper with its back to the camera. (This suggests to me that Ramey WAS trying to be careful.) But in the Ramey memo photo, Ramey tilted the paper forward a little bit, as if to maybe look at it, Johnson was standing well above him (Ramey was kneeling), and Johnson’s camera caught an angle on the paper. Ramey probably wasn’t even aware that the front had been photographed, and apparently nobody else noticed either back then. At the time, there was no known security breach. Nobody paid attention for at least another 40 years, when Brad Sparks got a blow-up and made the first attempt to read the memo. Even then Brad was making out a few words, now universally agreed upon, like “weather balloons”, “disc”, and “Fort Worth, Tex.” Clearly words like “weather balloons” and “disc” establish this message as being about Roswell, contradicting another of Kevin’s oft-used Ramey memo debunking arguments, “How do we even know this is about Roswell?”

Human beings are human beings. Even military generals slip up now and then, purely by accident, or sometimes through carelessness or human frailty, such as drinking too much at a cocktail party. Claiming that military officers are somehow perfect and would never do this is nonsense.

In hindsight, there were probably other security breaches, though also overlooked at the time. Ramey, e.g., was quoted saying the radar kite would have been 25 feet across if reconstructed. Where did he get that? It isn’t the description of his 4-foot-across radar kite, but closer to what some witnesses have said was the size of the main crash object. Maybe this was no slip-up. Perhaps Ramey was trying to cover more bases should word of the crash object’s true size leak out. (This goes, e.g., to the Lydia Sleppy/Johnny McBoyle suppressed teletype story.)

Marcel was quoted back then saying the debris was scattered over a square mile. Again that is grossly inconsistent with Ramey’s singular weather balloon/radar target, and even a Mogul balloon, but not with other descriptions of the large debris field full of anomalous debris. Marcel was to repeat the “square mile” debris description to Leonard Stringfield 30 years later.

It could even be argued that the base press release that they had recovered a flying disc was a security breach in itself. Kevin himself has long wondered why the military would ever release this information, making the entire world aware of something happening at Roswell. Haut in his affidavit says it was a calculated risk by Ramey and the Pentagon, a military diversion from the more accessible and more damning craft/body site to the remote and less damning Brazel debris field. And anyway, Ramey ridiculed the whole thing and killed interest within a few hours with his weather balloon debunking. This was a classic propaganda bait-and-switch ploy that worked incredibly well.

There were many serious inconsistencies in the official story that day, which could have compromised attempts to squash the story had the press been on the ball. I just see this as normal loose ends created by a fast changing situation. The military didn’t have time to craft a perfectly consistent story and get everybody properly briefed and on the same page. As it was, the press was asleep, so no problem.

Kevin also claims there is no evidence that there is anything classified about the Ramey memo. Well there is no doubt it is about Roswell and it is military in origin. Kevin citing one Bond Johnson claim that maybe he handed Ramey the memo as “evidence” that it is civilian borders on laughable, and Kevin knows it. This goes along with other of Johnson’s unbelievable claims, such as personally unpacking the radar target and displaying it (which Kevin has rightfully ridiculed), falsely accusing Kevin of altering transcripts of interviews with him, or that the debris was real flying saucer debris. Johnson also completely retracted his claim in his interview with Dennis Balthaser, saying it was nothing but earlier speculation on his part and that he no longer believed it himself. He was now arguing the message was military. I previously pointed this out to Kevin in email. So why does he bring up Johnson’s claim yet again even after Johnson admitted it was speculation and totally recanted it?

We also know this message couldn’t have come from Johnson and must be military because the wording and letter counts are nothing like any of the civilian news stories of the time (just one example, nobody was yet using “weather balloon” much less the plural “weather balloons” in any of the Roswell news stories at the time the photo was taken). I have an extensive compilation of about four dozen Roswell news stories on my website and none of them is remotely close to the Ramey memo. Both Brad Sparks and I have gone into extensive rebuttals as to why this isn’t civilian, details I can’t possibly go into here.

Since this is military, this puts Kevin in the uncomfortable position of contradicting himself. He can’t argue a military message about Roswell wouldn’t be classified while also arguing that Roswell was an alien saucer crash and would be highly classified. As Joe Capp rightly points out, the Ramey memo doesn’t exist in a vacuum apart from the hundreds of witnesses whose testimony Kevin uses to argue an extraterrestrial event. Kevin can’t have it both ways.

It also ignores the fact that Ramey himself publicly stated the matter was highly classified in various United Press stories that I have found. So he’s handling a message about Roswell (words like “disc”, “weather balloons”, etc.), he admits the matter is highly classified, but Kevin says there is no evidence that the message is classified. Say what?

Finally, I’ve also argued there may be a faint “secret” or “top secret” stamp in the lower left in the shadows. The corresponding position at the top left is hidden from view by a curl in the paper (plus lots of paper slant and heavy shadow). While I can’t demonstrate with certainly that there are such security stamps there, Kevin is in the less enviable position of trying to prove a negative, that they aren’t there. How do you do that? Remote viewing perhaps? X-ray vision? At least I provide a graphic that you can look at and judge for yourself. .(http://roswellproof.homestead.com/Top_Secret.html) What has Kevin got other than argument by assertion?

What really bothers me is that no matter how many times I refute his arguments in private emails or in public forums, Kevin seems to learn nothing and just repeats them over and over again. Why such a leading proponent of a Roswell saucer crash would argue exactly like the Roswell debunkers on this matter continues to confound me.

RRR:First of all, the fact that you used the term "mythos" instead of "eyewitness testimony" speaks volumes in answer to your own question.

David, and others:In my humble opinion, at this juncture, what's needed is an augmented list of all of the witnesses, with a key, similar to what Ryan Wood did for the so-called "Majestic Documents", showing Credible, Questionable, Not-Credible, and a clear reason given for each reliability rating.

A few of the same names have been bantered about here (like Kaufman, and Dennis), but the actual list of witnesses is long, and the reasons for their retaining, or losing their credibility varies, and in some instances might be questioned by some other researchers.

For example, from David R.'s page pertaining to the witness testimony of Bill Brazel Jr.: "...he came across this collection of wreckage scattered over a patch of land about a quarter mile long, or so, and several hundred feet wide...it was traveling an airline route to Socorro..."

If he is still considered a credible witness, then most, if not all of these other arguments on whether-or-not it was a Mogul balloon, or that balloon debris seen on the office floor at all is just down-right ridiculous!

Phraseology usages such as "a quarter-mile long" are repeated over, and over by witnesses.

1) A traditional story, usually focusing on the deeds of gods or heroes, often in explanation of some natural phenomenon... It purports to be historical, but is useful to historians principally for what it reveals of the culture of the peoples it describes or among whom it is current.2) An imaginary or fictitious person, thing, event, or story.3) A collective opinion, belief, or ideal that is based on false premises or is the product of fallacious reasoning.

To most this is what "myth" means: a totally fictitious or exaggerated story that only gullible or ignorant people believe. Thus it is no accident that debunkers love to use such an obviously loaded propaganda word to try to define Roswell, instead of saying it is a controversial historical event, a much more accurate description.

Actually testimony like "scattered over half a mile or over an area of half a square mile" means little. If someone finds pieces of debris at point A and a few more at point B, and decides the two points are about half a mile apart he can use this phrase. There need not be anything in between. People are far too vague about distances and areas and, more important, the density of the debris over the stated area, to have their words taken too literally. Maybe Marcel was more careful with words than most, but how do we know?

It has also occurred to me that if David Rudiak's decipherment of the letters and words on the Ramey memo is correct (and it is a mighty big if), it can be said to slightly enhance Nick Redfern's 'Japanese connection' hypothesis rather than the ET one. The so-called "victims" were Japanese not extraterrestrial. Not having read Nick's book I don't know if he has considered this.

I have done my own decipherment of this part of the memo and have concluded the phrase can have 4 or 5 other interpretations than "the victims of the wreck".

Yes, the memo isn't specific about the nature of the "victims", but do you really think a crash of "monkeys" would require secrecy or in any way matches the dozen of body accounts? Let's stop introducing more red herrings here.

I'm unaware that either Japanese (or monkeys) are typically described as being about 4 feet tall or child-like in size (like 10-year olds) with oversized heads and eyes, slit for a mouth, hint or absence of nose and ears, bald, and overly long arms. These are common denominators in the first- and second-hand descriptions of the bodies. I can find no accounts where anyone saw or was told or thought that these bodies were anything other than "nonhuman".

The closest you can come to "Japanese" is a few descriptions of the eyes being slanted and having a somewhat Asian look. A few described yellowish skin. That's about it.

I am also unaware of any sort of aviation material back in 1947 that in any way matches the equally numerous first and second hand accounts of highly anomalous crash debris, stuff whose properties our labs are only now beginning to replicate.

When I pressed you on UFO Updates as to where the large debris field of anomalous metallic material came from, you reported you went to one of your anonymous self-admitted counterintelligence sources, who told you this was radar chaff used in their (imaginary) criminal experiment to help track their balloon/glider craft (with their hostile Japanese crew of Kamikaze pilots). Yeah right, fragile gum wrapper material, that jams radar, the opposite of helping to track an object, that also somehow is blown a hundred miles from White Sands to be concentrated in one area, and, of course, doesn't remotely fit the debris descriptions.

If such a total bullshit story doesn't tell you that you were being played, I suppose nothing ever will.

Thank-You for the clarification. Although you used "mythos", not myth, and its root is a Legend or story, I hear the myth word used to describe the whole of UFO stuff all the time, and wasn't sure what you might be saying by choosing that particular phraseology.

Dave:No need to get hostile. We may not all see it the same way, but we can still gather what information we can in the process. I don't really agree with the balloon, or Japanese theme, but I really appreciate the time other folks, including you, have spent trying to come to some understanding of what happened.

David Rudiak's work on the text from the Ramey memo is interesting. Although I think he has let his own bias form the text rather than any dispassionate effort, I can see how one might fall into that trap.

Looking at his scans in a small size, the words seems tantalizingly resolvable but (mostly) just out of reach.

After an hour or two looking at just some of the blobs, I am not convinced that Rudiak has recovered real information. For instance, I suggest that the word "finding" could be what is contained in the blob that Rudiak calls "victims". I would never say that I am certain about that. I think that there is just not enough real information in the scan.

The fact that Rudiak display his "solution" beneath the blurry original and asks the public to respond to a poll says a lot about his knowledge of scientific inquiry. The phrase "gilding the lilly" comes to mind. After all, it is often only after someone suggests a shape for a cloud in the sky, that you can see the shape for yourself. Here we are seeing the same principle at work, I suspect.

The fact the Redfern embraces such dubious material just because it supports one of his book ideas says a lot as well of course.

You say: "The fact the Redfern embraces such dubious material just because it supports one of his book ideas says a lot as well of course."

??????????????????

In my comment I specifically said:

"...I have indeed followed the Memo controversy closely. And I do believe a convincing argument has been made that there is indeed a reference to the 'victims of the wreck.' But, at the end of the day, I would not use it to bolster the Japanese angle. Why? Simply because the wording of the memo tells us absolutely zero about the nature of the victims."

How you can make your comment ("The fact the Redfern embraces such dubious material just because it supports one of his book ideas says a lot as well of course") when I specifically said I DON'T think the memo does anything to bolster the Japanese angle (because the nature of the "victims" is not defined) absolutely beyond me.

How right Lance is re the personal bias angle. My limited examination of the memo suggests (but no more than that) that the words DR classes as "the victims" are "eye witness". I base this on the letters in 'EYE' appearing very much, to me, as just that. And the initial letter of the 7- letter word can certainly be 'W'. Nothing will persuade me that the first letter of 'wreck' is a 'W'.

But these may be biased anti-ET views. Another possibility is "the viewing" or "the remains". But I give these far lower probability.

As for the idea that the great truth about Roswell and ETs is secretly contained on that little scrap of paper (and nowhere else, even after six decades!), I can only comment: "Words fail me". Which of course is what applies to the memo itself!

My point about the "victims" issue is that regardless of what the "victims" were, we are no nearer getting an answer - aside from eliminating any sort of device that couldn't hold a crew (such as a Mogul Balloon). And that's all.

You say: "The closest you can come to 'Japanese' is a few descriptions of the eyes being slanted and having a somewhat Asian look. A few described yellowish skin. That's about it."

No: Beverly Bean, the daughter of Melvin Brown, said of her father's viewing of the bodies:

"He told us they were nothing to be scared of. They were friendly-looking and had nice faces. THEY LOOKED ASIAN, he said, but had larger heads and no hair. They looked a yellowy color. He was frightened a bit because he knew he shouldn’t be doing it, so he only had a quick glimpse. But he said THEY COULD HAVE PASSED FOR CHINESE-THEY HAD SLANTED EYES."

To say someone could have "passed for Chinese" is pretty definitive. To pass for a Chinese person, you would have to look, well, pretty much Chinese.

It depends whose witness testimony we accept re their descriptions of the bodies.

Which specifically first-hand witnesses to the bodies do you cite as suppporting the alien angle?

Re the radar chaff angle: regardless of where the truth stands on this issue relative to Roswell (if anywhere), the fact is that in the summer of 1947, questions were being asked about flying disks and tinfoil/chaff by the FBI.

Here's the text of one such FBI document:

"The Director advised on August 14, 1947, that the Los Angeles papers were carrying headlines indicating that Soviet espionage agents had been instructed to determine the facts relative to the flying discs. The article carried a Washington date line and indicated that Red espionage agents had been ordered to solve the question of the flying discs, the Russians being of the opinion that this might be some new form of defense perfected by the American military. The article further recalled that during the recent war pieces of tin foil had been dropped in the air for the purpose of off-setting the value of radar being used by the enemy forces and that these aluminum discs might be a new development along this line. The Director inquired as to whether the Bureau had any such information."

Of course, this says nothing about Roswell. However, what is interesting is that this FBI document and the news article makes a connection between flying discs and pieces of tinfoil being 'dropped' in an attempt to foil radar - in the summer of 47.

Is this relevant? I don't know. Should we look into this matter? I think so. Someone in the summer of 47 - at an official level - was addressing the disc/tinfoil issue.

There are other Japanese angles too that have nothing to do with my book - that's the thing a lot of people forget: the Japanese angle has been told to many researchers (some long before the info given to me).

For example, John Keel wrote an article that appeared in the pages of Fate in April 1993.

Keel’s feature was titled Return of the Fugos and, in part, referred to a story told to Keel by "three different, unrelated people," each of who saw "a low-flying balloon somewhere in the U.S. in 1945 with a gondola containing a living creature."

Keel continued that, as the balloon came closer, the witnesses could see that the gondola contained an oriental-looking man wearing what may have been radio-headphones.

Keel’s sources further added that as the balloon bounced away, the military quickly arrived and "warned them sternly to forget what they had just seen."

In a self-published report titled UFO Crash Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum that surfaced in 1991– one year after John Keel’s theories first surfaced, and a full fourteen years before my Body Snatchers in the Desert was published – the well-known UFO researcher and collector of crashed UFO stories, Leonard Stringfield was told a very similar tale to that related to me.

According to Stringfield’s source – UFO researcher Timothy Cooper – he, Cooper, had then recently spoken with a nurse who had worked in the Medical Laboratory at Los Alamos (where the atomic bomb was developed) in the late 1940s, and who had an awareness of unusual bodies having been secretly flown to Los Alamos on a number of occasions from 1945 to 1947.

Cooper was further advised that: "It was rumored that they were human experiments for biological and nuclear medicine research. She thought they may have come from Japan after the war. She said they were small bodies with deformed heads and limbs."

Notably, after receiving this specific body of testimony and information, Cooper was literally swamped with masses of seemingly official MJ12 style documents from alleged insider sources that suggested aliens had crashed at Roswell. Was this an attempt to steer Cooper away from the human-experimentation angle that had been brought to his attention a couple of years earlier?

Very possibly: as time went on, and as Cooper began to receive yet more and more files of a strictly MJ12 and explicitly pro-UFO nature, claims and allegations began to circulate that Cooper had himself faked the material. The result: he dropped out of research; never again to resurface to any meaningful degree.

Then, in July 1997, at the height of the 50th anniversary of the Roswell affair, Popular Mechanics magazine published an article – written by Jim Wilson and titled Roswell Plus 50 – which stated that the magazine had been “alerted to a forthcoming release of documents” that could shed more light on Roswell.

Wilson very specifically, and carefully, stated the magazine had been "told" that "the documents scheduled for future release will tell of a Japanese counterpart to Operation Paperclip. One of its purposes was to determine if the Japanese had constructed a suicide-piloted version of the Fugo incendiary bomb…"

Wilson continued:

“[Popular Mechanics] suspects the craft that crashed at Roswell will eventually be identified as either a U.S. attempt to re-engineer a second-generation Fugo, or a hybrid craft which uses both Fugo lifting technology and a Horten-inspired lifting body [Author’s note: a reference to the brilliant Horten brothers of Nazi Germany, who designed and built a wealth of aircraft of unusual and striking designs]. In either case, Japanese engineers and pilots brought to the U.S. after the war to work on the project could have been the dead ‘alien’ bodies recovered at the crash site.”

Then there is the story of Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico, who has long been linked with the Roswell event, amid claims that he traveled to the area in the wake of the crash, along with Counter-Intelligence Corps investigator Bill Rickett, and later prepared a classified report on his investigation. But there was one aspect of La Paz’s work that few pro-ET researchers are keen to comment on and highlight. Namely, that official University of New Mexico files reveal that during the Second World War, La Paz was “busy in secret government work” to combat Japan’s Fugo Balloon raids. The man was an absolute expert on Japan’s secret balloon project.

Indeed, if the object that crashed at Roswell in 1947 was somehow connected to secret, advanced post-Fugo Balloon experiments, then, arguably, in terms of his skills and his close proximity to the crash site, there was no better person for the military to secretly consult on how and why the device crashed than La Paz himself.

A respected and recently-retired Australian UFO researcher, Keith Basterfield contacted me in late 2005, and advised me that he had received a story practically identical to that presented in Body Snatchers in the Desert, and that involved handicapped people used in controversial high-altitude balloon-based experiments in the New Mexican deserts in the summer of 1947.

Basterfield informed both me and the Project 1947 discussion list that his source – whose father had worked in British intelligence – had related the details to him approximately six months before Body Snatchers was published.

I was later able to speak directly, extensively and personally with Basterfield’s source, who confirmed to me the data that had been provided by his father, and which did indeed centre upon handicapped people exploited in high-altitude balloon flights over New Mexico in the summer of 1947.

On another – yet very possibly directly related – matter, within the pages of his highly controversial book The Day After Roswell, Colonel Philip J. Corso asserted that while working in the U.S. Army’s Foreign Technology Division in the early 1960s, he had personal, hands-on access to recovered unusual debris from the Roswell crash – debris that Corso maintained until his dying day had alien origins.

It must be said that many researchers vehemently dispute the Corso tale; and indeed whatever the truth of the matter, Corso took the full story to the grave with him, when he died in 1998.

One issue that is seldom addressed, however, is whether or not Corso was wittingly or unwittingly helping to perpetuate a cover story designed to hide something else and protect certain players in the saga of Roswell. And on this matter, we now find that Corso was a close friend and colleague of a man who was a key player in the history of Japan’s Unit 731: one General Charles Willougby.

Willoughby was nothing less than the head of the Intelligence Department of the Allied Forces HQ under MacArthur, and he almost single-handedly coordinated the clandestine operation to ensure that the United States alone benefited from the interrogation of Unit 731 personnel, and the analysis of retrieved documentation and technical and scientific materials.

Moving on: according to all of the people I interviewed for Body Snatchers, several of the victims that died on the high-altitude balloon flights in the summer of 1947 were suffering from two particular conditions: Progeria and Werner’s syndrome.

Those with Progeria only rarely exceed four feet in height, and are completely lacking in body hair – including eye-brows and eye-lashes. There are also skeletal and structural abnormalities, such as a receding chin, an oversized bald head, a beak-like nose, and protruding eyes. Werner’s syndrome is also a Progeria disorder and is known as progeria adultorum, or Progeria of the adult.

Interestingly, of the approximately 1,000 cases of Werner’s syndrome currently on record, more than 800 can be found in Japan – the direct result of the fact that in Japan first- and second-hand marriages are more common than in the West. Men with the condition are rarely more than five feet tall, and women several inches under that.

One source who I interviewed for the book was a former employee of the Oak Ridge, Tennessee National Laboratory, and who is identified in its pages as the Black Widow – as a direct result of her concerns about being publicly identified.

In 2001, she quietly and guardedly informed me that she was personally aware of the true nature of the Roswell events, and said that the legend was borne out of a series of catastrophic balloon-based accidents.

Moreover, she added that some of the bodies that had been recovered from the doomed flights showed distinct signs and symptoms of handicaps, and were secretly taken to Oak Ridge for study.

Today, at least parts of her story can now be validated: I recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act copies of files showing that in the summer of 1947, various “test subjects” that displayed signs of Progeria, Ellis-van Creveld syndrome and other forms of dwarfism were the subjects of secret radiation-based experiments at Oak Ridge.

Those same files were sent to Oak Ridge’s Biology Library and also to the Clinton National Laboratory.

Not only that: the files were also shared with an organization called NEPA: the Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft project. An ill-fated operation, NEPA was tasked with coming up with plans for new and radical aircraft that would be propelled via nuclear power, rather than by conventional jet-engines or propellers. The project faced numerous, insurmountable problems, however, and was ultimately confined to the waste-basket.

And while we cannot yet say for certain that these files offer undeniable corroboration for the story told in Body Snatchers in the Desert, we are now in a position to state with certainty the following: in the summer of 1947, documentation was generated at the Oak Ridge facility on radiation experiments undertaken on large-headed, bald dwarfs. That same documentation was subsequently shared with project staff involved in the design of distinctly unusual aircraft.

Moving on further, I recently read a very interesting - and very personalized - book on the events of July 1947: Roswell - A Quest for the Truth, written by John A. Price.

I had actually overlooked the book when it was published back in 1997 (it was recently brought to my attention by a fellow-researcher); however, reading it now reveals some intriguing data that may be of relevance to that which is contained in my own Body Snatchers in the Desert.

For example, on pages 31-32 of the book, Price recalls how, in 1978, and while working as a roofer at Hingerman (a small town southeast of Roswell), he witnessed at one particular home several unusual-looking, deformed children.

In Price's own words, they were around "four and one-half feet tall," "had larger heads;" and "were completely hairless." Also: "...their noses and ears were very small."

Interestingly, he added: "They were the closest I've ever seen who looked alien to me. I knew they were not."

Further on in the book (in a chapter specifically titled Was it Ours?), Price quotes from the letter of a man who advised him that "...the aliens I was looking for were at Fort Stanton."

Fort Stanton, as I have noted before - and as I detail in my brand-new Darklore article on Roswell for Greg Taylor - was home during the Second World War to Japanese individuals and, later to physically-handicapped people, too.

The letter-writer added to Price that with respect to Fort Stanton: "...There were some pretty deformed young men there...mongoloid large heads, small ears, pin heads who could function and had shrill voices. They were supposed to be of incest, but from their looks - Outa-space."

Is Price's collective data on this matter of relevance to the data contained within the pages of Body Snatchers in the Desert? Those who support an other-worldly scenario for Roswell would, of course, say "No!"

However, I'm inclined to ask: what are the chances of aliens from some far-off world (with large heads, small ears, and dwarfish bodies) turning up in the same location as human-beings seemingly exhibiting similar characteristics?

Finally, I'll never ever stop looking because - whatever the truth of Roswell - the case is at the absolute heart of ufology. And the implications for ufology, if the truth ever surfaces to where we can actually prove something, are huge.

And here's why: the UFO community has built up Roswell to be the Holy Grail of ufology. Now, if Roswell is one day proven to be alien, then the community can indeed proudly stand up and say "We got it right." But, if Roswell is one day proven to be non-alien, then I predict much of modern day ufology will collapse, as will much of the "scene." And by the "scene," I mean the lecture-circuit, the conferences, the magazines etc.

To continue in this vein: if the McMinville photos were proven to be hoaxes, would ufology collapse? Nope. If the Mantell case was 100 percent proven to be non-UFO related, would ufology collapse? Nope. Same for just about any other currently unexplained case.

And why is that? I'll tell you: none of those cases have been given superstar status of the type upon which much of ufology now stands or falls.

That is ufology's biggest ever mistake: making Roswell a make-or-break case for the subject. I actually don't think this has even been done consciously or deliberately, however.

But the fact is there will be truly massive disillusionment within ufology if Roswell falls. In fact, I do not even believe that the ETH will survive within modern-day ufology if Roswell falls - the stakes reallly are that high, in my opinion. But, so what? At the end of the day, it shouldn't matter if the "good old days" of ufology vanish. Getting the truth is all that should matter.

Do I think we will ever get the Roswell truth? Well, we may actually have it in one of the above-scenarios of ET, Japanese tests, or Mogul; but the problem is we can't definitely prove it.

The only way that can really happen is for an official announcement to be made that all the previous stories were lies and "here's the truth."

But even that won't work, and here's why: if the Government says that yes, it has now located documents showing that the Japanese angle is correct, the UFO community will say it's just another cover story to hide the UFO angle.

The hardcore UFO community will never accept any explanation from the Government on Roswell unless it vindicates the ETH - ever.

That's a fact - but an unfortunate one that is driven by emotion and a dread of feeling that they have wasted their lives on something that actually has zero to do with "real" UFOs; but everything to do with the way the subject may have been manipulated to hide a darker secret.

Look at Paul Bennewitz and how the official world shamefully used the UFO subject in that caper. It's not unknown for Ufology - and ufologists - to be used like puppets on a string for other reasons. So, I will continue - and I am continuing - to investigate all the Roswell-Japanese threads that come to me.

But do I think a firm, undeniable vindication for that scenario will ever surface? It may; but at the end of the it's completely irrelevant because Ufology (as a collective group) will continue to disbelieve it - because it's not supportive of the "dead aliens in the desert" scenario.

So, in that sense at least, Roswell will never ever be resolved. Just like Jack the Ripper, just like the JFK assassination.

None of the data cited above on the Japanese/handicapped angle is from me, but is all from additional sources, rsearchers, documents etc.

To what extent it has a bearing on the general Japanese angle of Roswell is something that we can disagree on forever.

But everyone who disagrees with what is often mistakenly referred to as "Nick Redfern's theory" should be aware of all the above data from totally different sources to me. In other words, there are actually quite a few threads that suggest the Japanese angle has merit.

And there's something else that always puzzles me: why on earth would the official world want to hide the ET angle of Roswell by saying it really undertook diabolical experiments on handicapped people and POWs?

Arguably, this would be (in some ways) even more controversial than if aliens did crash!

In addition, adding a Japanese angle into the mix only adds to the scenario that Mogul and the crash test dummy scenarios are bogus.

It makes no sense for the official world to introduce another scenarion (Japanese) when it already has Mogul and the dummy explanations firmly in place.

Whether or not the Japanese angle is the truth is a matter of debate. But as a disinfo op, it makes no sense - for the reasons in the 4 paragraphs above.

Yes, I do think there is a convincing argument re the "victims of the wreck" controversy.

And yes, I understand that you view the whole thing as "dubious."

However, this doesn't take away the fact that you specifically stated:

"The fact the Redfern embraces such dubious material just because it supports one of his book ideas says a lot as well of course."

Whereas (if you go back and read my comment to CDA) I actually said that yes, I believe the "victims" angle has merit.

But I then said I specifically don't suggest that the memo supports my book - because the word "victims" is far too vague to apply it to any particular scenario involving the recovery of bodies (whatever they may have been).

So, even though you say I embrace the info to support my book, the opposite is the case: it's an interesting document, but proves nothing at all, even if it does say "Victims."

Rather ironically, you have misinterpreted my words...which is what you're suggesting has been done with the Ramey memo.

I find it hard to imagine how anyone could look at Rudiak's "work" and not see the glaring problems (highlighted by his hilarious refusal to try a blind test of his "methods").

That someone could find that stuff "convincing" boggles the mind!

Actually in the UFO world, where science is a discipline of the heart rather than the mind, it's not so hard to find that type of person.

That a much respected UFO "researcher" operates using this kind of "saucer science" and adding to the abundant "literature" is just one of the reasons that I can list here all of the great UFO breakthroughs made since 1947:

We may disagree on much (or maybe not, I don't know), but no-one in Ufology should disagree that there has been a complete failure to make any UFO advances - at least, in terms of finding proof of what UFOs are. It has indeed been an absolute failure.

We are no nearer to having actual answers than was anyone 24 hours after Kenneth Arnold's sighting.

Everyone who ever entered the UFO arena, and who is now six-foot-under ground, died without getting the answers.

Such it was, such it always will be.

I am absolutely confident that not a single UFO researcher alive today will ever see the ETH (as it relates to UFOs) vindicated - just like all the rest who came before: Keyhoe, Stringfield, Hynek, etc etc.

I need to stress that the Government files do not refer to (as you worded it) "the human radiation testing the US did that created the alien lookalikes?"

These people weren't "created" or mutated in experiments. They were experiments on already-physically handicapped people - akin to the "Human Radiation Experiment" scandal that surfaced years ago, in the 90s.

Regarding the claim that this is a civilian teletype bulletin handed to General Ramey by photographer J. Bond Johnson, Johnson recanted the claim, saying it was nothing but speculation on his part. (Also as Kevin well knows from bitter experience, Johnson turned flaky and became completely unreliable in his later claims.)

Nonetheless, Johnson's civilian wire story claim was repeated by UFO historian Barry Greenwood and trumpeted by various skeptics.

When Andy Roberts and David Clarke smugly proclaimed in a Fortean Times op-ed that Greenwood had destroyed the significance of the Ramey memo, I wrote a rebuttal article detailing why Greenwood's arguments were totally bogus.

I just put this up on my website to read for anybody who is interested.

http://www.roswellproof.com/Fortean_Times.html

I mentioned earlier there were detailed arguments by Brad Sparks and myself why this wasn't civilian in origin. Well here they are. (somewhat abbreviated because of space limitations by the magazine)

Thus what we have concerning the Ramey memo is:1. It is clearly something about the ongoing Roswell situation (universally agreed on words such as "DISC" and "WEATHER BALLOONS")2. There is no even remote match between it and civilian wire service stories (including the fact that it uses the second person, such as "YOU FORWARDED" which would not be used in a civilian teletype news story).3. So it is about Roswell and it is military. Thus Kevin can't plausibly argue that this message wouldn't be classified or significant while also steadfastly arguing that this was a real saucer crash, was highly classified, and was covered up.4. Even if you buy that this was about a Mogul balloon crash, it is still going to be classified and sensitive.5. Ramey himelf was quoted in 1947 saying that the matter was highly classified (his given reason why he hadn't let anybody else view or photograph the "disc" at that point). It was also reported (e.g. Washington Post) that AAF Pentagon officials and PR people told the presss that they had "clamped a security lid on" since it was "high level stuff."

"No evidence" that the Ramey memo would have been classified and sensitive? I think not.

The message getting photographed was an accident and totally unnoticed at the time. Previously Kevin has written on his blog that no cover-up (i.e. Roswell) can be THAT perfect.

Well it wasn't. Here we have a simple, momentary slip-up and Kevin instead argues that Ramey would never have allowed a sensitive message to be photographed because military officers like Ramey WERE perfect.

Ramey was human, just like the other historical, high-level, security-conscious people I've detailed here who carelessly allowed sensitive documents to be photographed or blurted out top-secret information. This includes military people such as Gen. Henry Miller, who blurted out the time of the D-Day invasion at a cocktail party. Ramey's slip-up was minor by comparison. Miller's mistake could have cost us the war.

I tried to make this column as non judgemental as possible, refusing to engage in a debate about interpretation. If others wished to do so, fine by me.

I do object to having my words ignored on this blog. I said, "Which is not to say that they wouldn’t have made such a mistake, only that it is extremely unlikely and citing examples from the civilian world doesn’t really make the point."

I also I thought Ramey's aide should have stopped him though we don't know the aide was in the room, and that DuBose should have stopped him, but DuBose did not. It wasn't Ramey in there alone, and he knew he was in the presence of a reporter.

Nowhere did I say that it was impossible for Ramey to have made the mistake, only that I found it unlikely.

I will also note that General Miller did not give away the date of the invasion, only that it would probably happen sometime prior to June 15... that everyone in Europe, Germans, Americans, French, British knew it was coming, but not where.

So, yes, officers make mistakes, and I didn't say they didn't. Only that it was unlikely...

When the mood moves, I'll weigh in on this whole Ramey memo thing with my latest thoughts... which evolve as I learn more about the case to include one of the few cases a scientific study was used to determine if priming had contaminated the data.

Kevin wrote:"I will also note that General Miller did not give away the date of the invasion, only that it would probably happen sometime prior to June 15... that everyone in Europe, Germans, Americans, French, British knew it was coming, but not where."

Kevin, regardless of your personal opinion as to how important Gen. Miller's information was, Eisenhower considered it one of the two most important secrets of the invasion. He had already imposed unprecedented security measures to keep it from leaking out, which Miller was well aware of, and was so infuriated that Miller let the timing slip out he permanently demoted his friend and West Point classmate to colonel and shipped him home in disgrace with his future military career in ruin. That's how important it was.

The Germans didn't know exactly where the invasion was coming (though almost certainly in France at one of two locations) and they didn't know when, only that it was coming in the next few months. (It was impossible for the Allies to set an exact date because it depended on such vagaries as the weather.)

One thing I learned from a visit to Bletchley Park last summer, where they decrypted the German Enigma code, is that their new high speed electronic computer on June 5 had decrypted in a timely fashion a high-level German communique that they still didn't know where the attack was coming. This was considered a key, last-minute, decisive factor by Eisenhower and Montgomery in ordering the go-ahead for the invasion the next day (that plus the weather). So the exact date was last-minute, but the invasion had always been planned for early June. This was always considered to be incredibly sensitive information.

Although I didn't mention it, a similar incident happened the next month with a Naval officer (not identified in the book I looked at--Ike's Spies), who had also been out drinking and started talking about specifics of timing, place, and logistics. He too got unceremoniously sent back to the States. Thus another high _military_ person talking about important secrets in a public place.

Had the Germans known the invasion was planned for early June and before June 15 (as Gen. Miller blurted out in April) it would have been a highly significant piece of intelligence. They would have had their Army on full alert for this period instead of having their guard down, with many senior officers on leave and crack Panzer divisions pulled back, leaving only shallow coastal defenses. Knowing the timing could have changed everything and cost us D-Day, at least greatly extending the war if not worse.

Had the U.S. similarly known the Japanese were almost certainly going to attack in early December before the 15th, even if we didn't know exactly where, I suspect Pearl Harbor would have had a different outcome. The element of surprise is crucial in such battles.

Regarding Kevin's statements that it was highly unlikely that a military officer like Ramey would slip up because of experience and military protocol, unlike the various historical high-level civilian security screw-ups I mentioned, he was definitely arguing that it was just about next to impossible, ignoring the fact that it DID happen and also ignoring the simple human element that anyone can momentarily make a mistake (as appears to be the case with Ramey, who was obviously making an effort to present only the back of the paper to the camera).

When I mentioned a similar military, not civilian, mistake by a general, all Kevin can argue is that the mistake wasn't significant, even though it obviously was and far more serious. Certainly Eisenhower thought so.

Surely Gen. Miller would never bring up such highly classified information in a public setting. But he did. Surely some other officer would have quickly intervened and shut him up. But they didn't.

Do we need to keep belaboring this point? People make mistakes, even experienced generals. I have given multiple historical examples. End of story. Arguing that it couldn't happen because generals would never allow it to happen is fallacious circular reasoning.

Kevin's other key blog debunking point is that there is "no evidence" that the memo is classified, and to bolster this also throws in what he knows to be a one-time comment by non-credible photographer and fact-spinner Johnson that _maybe_ he handed Ramey a civilian wire service story. (Johnson later recanted this as mere speculation on his part--Kevin didn't bother to mention this.) Obviously Kevin was again trying to insinuate this was a non-military telegram and of no importance.

Well this message certainly IS about Roswell (even though Kevin has also tried to argue in the past that there was no evidence that it was), it is highly unlikely it is civilian (see my arguments previously in blog comments), which leaves Kevin, a major saucer-crash proponent, in the strange position of both arguing that Roswell obviously was super secret but this message wasn't at all classified or important, in other words, trying to have it both ways. That's why he keeps bringing up the red herring that this is a civilian message, even though there isn't a single piece of credible evidence or analysis of the civilian wire stories to support this. Again, please see my detailed rebuttal arguments against civilian origins in my Fortean Times article, just up on my website:

The one thing that hasn't been questioned yet, that I can see,is why he would even have a piece of paper,like this, in his hand AT ALL?

Why would he be seen in any of the pictures holding anything like it, turning its back to the camera or not? He would have set it down on the desk first, and not posed while still holding it...classified or not.

That is just one reason I don't think it was an accident, whatever it says.

This whole subject (UFOs/Flying Discs) has caused several rifts to appear between the services, and between Command structures, as to whether-or-not it should be a secret.

Robert/Douglas McLaughlin is only one of many that we saw, through the many years, that took it upon themselves to release secret information about the discs, because they were so opposed to the secrecy order.

The fact of the Roswell story being a saucer being pulled after the fact is reason to suspect that there was division in the ranks.

Again, I wonder if you were the one about to be photographed, would you have held on to any piece of paper regarding the case, so that you would be forced to "hide it" by turning it away from the camera? No! You would have handed it away, or set it down, or something.

And also there is the information, apparently in Mr. Hasting's book, about Lytle's relating information about alien bodies.

Again, this brings me to the question of each witnesses credibility, as far as a group of respected Roswell researchers goes. If Lytle is another credible witness, what does that say about other hypotheses other than alien?

Bill Moore in "The Roswell Incident" claims that the piece of paper contains the rough text of the radio announcement Ramey was to make. However, Moore had absolutely no way of knowing this, so it is mere speculation. Karl Pflock is inclined to much the same view in his 2001 book. Perhaps the text is not typed at all but handwritten in capital letters, with a few crossings out and erasures, which accounts for the smudgy appearance in places. A military memo - yes. A secret memo - not an iota of evidence. There is simply no way of answering the question of this little sheet of paper.

Is there any recording of what Ramey's actual words were on that broadcast?

I will add one thing. The message, whatever it was, was obviously not thought important enough to retain.Had it been retained, the GAO would undoubtedly have uncovered it during their Roswell searches. And we would not still be arguing about its contents today.

"People ae far too vague abut distances and areas and, more important, the density of the debris over the stated area..."

It was dense enough to inhibit the movement of sheep.

Nick Redfern:

"why on earth would the official world want to hide the ET angle of Roswell by saying it really undertook diabolical experiments on handicapped people and POWs?"

But this isn't the OFFICIAL position; MOGUL is.

"In addition,adding a Japanese angle into the mix only adds to the scenario that Mogul and the crash test dummies scenarios are bogus."

But serious doubts have been raised about both anyway. MOGUL can't account for bodies and the test dummies explanation is hardly credible. Apparently, the government felt that a new nonET explanation was needed, so their operatives conjured this up. Strange that it took as long as it did for the Japanese angle to come to our attention, and it only did so when it was apparently needed to supplement the earlier nonET "explanations."

"It has indeed been an absolute failure....."

Frustrating as the lack of definitive answers has been, I beg to differ. If you compare the number of people willing to believe in ETs at the start to the extent of belief now, I'd say that progress is being made toward satisfying at least one prerequisite for disclosure.

First, the idea that if people loftily demand that the "government" (and I use that word as a catch-all for whoever may be sitting on a big UFO secret - if anyone is) releases the truth, the government will then just go ahead and reveals the truth - and admit it blatantly lied for more than 60 years - is absurd.

And, really, it doesn't matter how many people believe in UFOs. Ten million people could petition the government to "reveal the truth," but if those who don't want the data releasing decide not to release it, then it simply won't get released.

Plus, I don't see the government deciding to make the decision without us pushing for it, because it serves them no advantage to do so.

Re the Japanese and Mogul angles, you say: "Apparently, the government felt that a new nonET explanation was needed, so their operatives conjured this up."

I have to disagree with this. If the New York Times or the Washington Post (etc) were hot on the trail of Roswell, I might just agree that there was a need for the government to muddy the waters even further.

But they're not hot on the trail. In fact, aside from the occasional TV documentary, the only people seriously concerned about Roswell are a couple of thousand people within Ufology. And of that couple of thousand, only a handful investigate Roswell.

No-one else cares - anywhere, ever, aside from watching the occasional TV documentary, and then returning to day to day life. And they won't care unless (or until) the UFO community can deliver the defintive goods.

The public sees it as something that occasionally interests them enough to watch a show on it.

And so that largely leaves small segments of the UFO community to investigate it.

But that same UFO community doesn't believe anything the government says about Roswell. So again, introducing a Japanese angle makes no sense (and is not even necessary), because it will be dismissed - and was (mostly) dismissed anyway.

And I have to come back to the most important point: yes, I can totally understand the government (whether officially or unofficially) creating/sanctioning Roswell cover-stories.

But...the idea that (officially or unofficially) the Government would sanction a cover story that involves the government undertaking terrible experiments on handicapped people and POWs is insane.

Some people would say (and indeed have said - correctly, in my view) that if the handicapped/POW story is true, in some ways it's actually far more controversial than the ET angle.

The whole point of the Mogul and crash-test dummy scenarios is not only that they provide an alternative to ET theories, they are also (and this is important) extremely non-controversial scenarios.

No-one on the inside would want the Roswell floodgates opened by creating such a controversial human-experiment angle.

That's one of the reasons why I think the Japanese angle has validity.

Bob Koford wrote:The one thing that hasn't been questioned yet, that I can see,is why he would even have a piece of paper,like this, in his hand AT ALL?

Why would he be seen in any of the pictures holding anything like it, turning its back to the camera or not? He would have set it down on the desk first, and not posed while still holding it...classified or not.

That is just one reason I don't think it was an accident, whatever it says.-------------

I certainly don't think exposure of the memo was a deliberate act. Why totally keep the back of the paper to the camera in 3 photos, with only a slight angle of the front shown in a fourth (because the paper, with back still to camera was tilted forwarded a bit)? If Ramey was trying to make exposure of a big secret easier, he didn't do a very good job.

Why was the paper in his hand? Could be nothing more than simple absentmindedness. My _guess_ as to what happened is that events were very rushed. Ramey was out of the room when photographer Johnson first arrived. The photo shows Ramey also clutching his stylish Rayban aviator sunglasses along with the memo, suggesting that maybe he had just come in from outside. I've always viewed the message as a copy of the original sent message. There is a little bit of handwriting at the bottom, perhaps short notes taken down over the phone by an aide, because the handwriting does not appear to be Ramey's.

So Ramey is _perhaps_ handed the notated copy as he comes back to his office. He takes off his sunglasses for indoors and also to look at it. But Johnson is already there and Ramey is anxious to get the photo session done, advance the weather balloon story, and then there is the scheduled radio appearance to further debunk the story. He probably has to get back to his superiors at the Pentagon. And he has to deal with the comments on the memo copy, which he hasn't read and thought about yet. Ramey has to multitask.

So much to cover up, so little time. If he blows this coverup, his career is over, and he knows it. It's tension city at FWAAF HQ, which may also explain why Ramey's thumbnail appears to be chewed in the infamous photo. Anxiety can also contribute to people making mistakes.

So he's chatting up Johnson, "Oh it's just a weather balloon," posing for photos, and finally shoots a glance at the notated copy to perhaps plan his next move, tilting the page forward to read it. Johnson says "smile", Ramey looks up to smile, the flashbulb goes off, but Ramey has absentmindedly neglected to tilt the paper back, perhaps not even realizing that the front is showing. However, nobody even notices the tiny piece of paper in the grainy wirephoto stories, so no harm done. Further, nobody can tell that there is writing on it.

So I think something along those lines happened, a simple accident in the midst of the tension and hubbub around a rapidly-changing situation.

Much of the Roswell case (and the UFO evidence in general) has been built around military officers who have talked out of school, though decades later in the Roswell case. E.g., both Generals Exon and Dubose have weighed in as to what happened. Maybe they were just sick and tired over the coverup, feeling the passage of time made the material much less sensitive. Were they violating their security oaths?

Whatever, military officers certainly do sometimes spill secrets either accidentally, carelessly, or deliberately. Bob Koford's mention of Cmndr Robert McLaughlin, naval missile director at White Sands, who was publicly blabbing about the many UFO incidents there, is another very good example.

"People ae far too vague abut distances and areas and, more important, the density of the debris over the stated area..."

Starman responded:It was dense enough to inhibit the movement of sheep.------It was also dense enough that Brazel went to Roswell to get help because there was too much for him to pick up. (I got this from Frank Joyce who told me that one thing upsetting Brazel when he spoke to him upon coming to Roswell was the large quantity of debris.) Marcel indicated that he and Cavitt could only pick up a fraction of it which they packed into two vehicles. It was so dense and large, it required a large clean-up effort afterward involving at least dozens of men to sweep the area and pick up the pieces.

Debunkers try to depict Moguls as being skyscrapers of material, but they were balloons, the sum total of everything even when intact amounted to less than 100 pounds. For a weather balloon train to descend, many of the balloons had to have popped and payload was automatically cut loose by pressure switches and explosive charges on descent, leaving that many miles from the Brazel place.

So in the Mogul crash scanario maybe a dozen surviving weather balloons and a few radar targets, all strung together with several hundred feet of twine and line, which nobody ever described. (Where did it go?) This is going to come down in a relatively small area, be very lightweight, and very easy to pickup. Flight #6 from June 7 was reported by a rancher to Mogul. They sent out two or three guys in a jeep to recover it. It wasn't scattered over Marcel's "square mile" and didn't require busloads of men surrounded by MPs to sweep the area afterward.

I just read the excellent paper you did with James Houran on the memo text. Great job.

http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_16_1_houran.pdf

I know you believe that the debris is planted, but did you happen to ever examine any high rez scans of the photos to see if you could make out any of the oft-mentioned markings (which skeptics have suggested might be decorated tape)?

I wish someone would post high resolution scans of the photos somewhere.

"I don't see the government deciding to make the decision without us pushing for it, because it serves them no advantage to do so."

Yes and I've always felt disclosure would be highly detrimental to present government and society. That explains all the measures they've taken to muddy the waters. The mainstream media may not be investigating Roswell much, but thanks to UFOlogist investigators, the subject is still very well known to great numbers of people. Potentially, pressure for disclosure could mount consideably--unless measures were taken to sow confusion and doubt about the ET view. Silly as the nonET explanations are, the powers that be can't let the ET proponents appear to "win" definitively. Constantly muddying the waters is the key to keeping the issue under control.

"But that same UFO community doesn't believe anything the government says about Roswell."

Not even Pflock and Korff? On some boards, like MUFON, I've seen posters who believe in UFOs but accept MOGUL, or are just so turned off by all the doubts and confusion about Roswell that they've "had it up to here" with that case. Undoubtedly, that was the government's intent.

"the idea that the Government... would sanction a cover story that involves the government undertaking terrible experiments on handicapped people and POWs is insane."

Surely you've heard of the Tuskegee syphilis and US plutonium experiments on children.http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/adrastea.htm

The US government has already admitted to carrying out horrific tests on thousands of its own citizens. It's not at all far fetched to suppose that, eager for a new nonET "explanation" to supplement MOGUL and crash dummies, it would conjure up the Japanese story.

But the point is this: if Roswell involved something controversial (ET, Japanese etc), the whole point of introducing cover stories is to create covers that are not controversial, because such extreme controversies may well cause unwarranted attention.

The official world (in my view) certainly wants to obfuscate and confuse what happened at Roswell, and Mogul and the dummies certainly did that.

And no one disputes that other human tests went on, but for elements of the official world to actively create spurious stories about horrific experiments is something that I just cannot see them doing.

Why not say it was several American pilots flying a new aircraft they didn't want the Russians to find out about at the time?

Why not say it was an early rocket test with monkeys?

I just can't see the logic of introducing something so bad and so controversial into the mix with official sanction - or unofficial sanction.

Yes, Pflock was a UFO believer and a non-believer re Roswell (as am I - there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that there's a real UFO phenomenon, but I just don't think evidence of that phenomenon crashed at Roswell).

But 1 or 2 people within ufology who dispute Roswell really doesn't make much difference to the overall community of a couple of thousand - a community that overwhelmingly *wants* Roswell to be alien.

"The mainstream media may not be investigating Roswell much, but thanks to UFOlogist investigators, the subject is still very well known to great numbers of people."

That's true, but so what? For example, I would go so far as to say that if you asked most people in the Western world today: "What is supposed to have happened at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947" they will reply along the lines of: "A flying saucer crashed."

It's like most people know what the Bermuda Triangle is supposed to be, or what Bigfoot is supposed to be, etc etc.

But, again: so what? Millions of people may have heard of Roswell, but none of those millions are doing anything about trying to resolve Roswell, because they don't care enough (or have a deep enough interest) to to do anything about it.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

The UFO research community fails to see the importance of one critical issue: most people on the planet don't care at all about what we do, and don't have an interest in UFOs.

For the most part, they might just watch the occasional TV program on UFOs and that's it.

And that's fine: UFOs aren't their gig. So, just because millions of people may have heard of Roswell actually has no bearing on anything at all - aside from making Roswell the most famous and well-known UFO case of all time.

You also say: "Potentially, pressure for disclosure could mount consideably--unless measures were taken to sow confusion and doubt about the ET view."

Why should pressure for disclosure work? Most politicians won't touch the UFO subject because of the stigma and the "little green men"-laughter/ridicule angle.

Even the General Accounting Office couldn't get anywhere with Roswell. Schiff couldn't. Ufology won't either - at least not via Disclosure.

Plus, the AF is adamant that nothing of any real significance happened at Roswell, and that Blue Book found nothing of significance.

I think there is something very innocent and quaint (and naive) about thinking that if we push our leaders to tell us the truth about UFOs that they will do it. I wish I had such faith, but I don't.

I would stress that my pessimism re Disclosure isn't because I don't think that pro-active actions can't work - they certainly can.

But it's the stigma attached to UFOs that makes me feel that those who could potentially really change things won't touch it.

And there's a gamble too: let's say Obama announced an investigation of black-budget projects in search of secret UFO info.

And let's say he found it, and it confirmed Roswell was indeed ET. He would be completely championed as the man who proved that life exists elsewhere - it would be a monumental event for the world and for his presidency.

But...if Obama ordered a study of the UFO mystery to see if there was Top Secret UFO data being hidden and (in a fashion slightly similar to the GAO re Roswell) it failed to turn up any smoking gun AT ALL, Obama would never live down the ridicule, as well as the issue of spending money on investigating something that didn't prove a damned thing, at a time when the economy is screwed.

You say: "Silly as the nonET explanations are, the powers that be can't let the ET proponents appear to "win" definitively."

I would agree with that: I think the official world sees (or at one point did see) the UFO community as on a par with protest groups, and tried to diffuse its strengths.

I have to disagree that most of UFO "community" believes in Roswell (as a UFO or other esoteric theory like your gruesome pet theory).

If you were referring to the public in general, you may be right. Of course those morons mostly don't believe in evolution either--which underlines the critical thought processes there.

But if, by "community," you meant the few researchers and hard core enthusiasts (like myself on the skeptical side), I think the opinion is much more divided.

There are far more than 1 or 2 Roswell detractors .

Maybe my opinion is colored because my friends among believers tend to discount Roswell. I talked with Karl Pflock as he went through his honest and, no doubt, painful realization that behind the curtain that the clowns of Roswell (like Glen Dennis) were holding, there was nothing but a cold and bitter darkness.

This is much the same transformation I made as a much younger man. I began to see that, no matter what the book I was reading promised, there would be no answer materializing as I turned the page.

The same type books keep getting written, of course (perhaps you looked up from typing one in order to read Kevin's blog?)

I can only hope that in this age of Monster Hunters and UFO Hunters (all of whom have bagged exactly ZERO prey) that more skeptics will be created from the sheer emptiness of the claims (despite the excellent writing that you use to prop them up), the damning lack of evidence, and the obvious and hilarious paucity of results.

I think (and it would actually be very interesting to see the results, if anyone wants to go ahead and do the following?) that if a poll was undertaken (perhaps via the setting up of a blog where people could log-on to give their views on Roswell), we would see a very significant percentage of the UFO community come out in support of the ETH for Roswell - far more than for any other theory.

I might be wrong, but I would be very surprised indeed if any other theory beat the ETH in terms of community-support re Roswell; or even if one or more of the other theories even came close.

Of the collective audience who, for example, read UFO Mag, Fate, subscribe to UFO Updates, regularly attend UFO gigs and conferences, listen to Coast to Coast etc etc etc, were all polled, I would be (as we say in England) completely gob-smacked if the ETH for Roswell wasn't miles ahead of all the other theories in terms of acceptance and popularity.

I do, however, have to agree re your comments about "the damning lack of evidence, and the obvious and hilarious paucity of results."

Even I admit this applies to a highly significant degree to Roswell.

Roswell is interesting because it has so many people in the story. But it's even more interesting because for such a high profile case with so many people attached to it (witnesses, first-hand, second-hand etc) nothing of physical substance has ever surfaced.

And that elusiveness can indeed be applied to most (maybe all) aspects of Forteana, too.

Maybe one day we will get something. Then again, we may well not.

That's why I always tell people they should always ensure that the majority of their lives should be kept well away from Ufology.

When Ufology becomes the main thing in people's lives, and they fail to get hard results in terms of actual evidence after years and years of making the subject their personal long-term obsession, it can cause major emotional trauma.

Over the last 20 or so years, I have seen more than a couple of people throw out their files and walk away from the subject disillusioned by the very fact that you bring up - a damning lack of any evidence after 60 something years of Ufology, and a feeling of having wasted so much time without any sort answer.

Of course, if like me, Ufology is just an interest that i write about and research - but where I don't have a vested "need" for UFOs to exist and where I have a life outside - it won't be the end of the world if I go to my grave not getting the answers.

Well, yes, it would be the end of my literal world! LOL. But, as much as I want the answers to the UFO puzzle, if we don't get them: well, there's much more to life than obsessing on some 60 year old desert incident.

A lot of people with an interest (quite possibly all of us) should prepare themselves for the fact that Roswell has now entered Jack-the-Ripper territory; and is so old it will never be solved - and each and every one of them will all die of old age never having resolved the case.

Its like someone offering you a piece of tasty chocolate, but then slapping you repeatedly. I just don't understand this sort of arrogant speech. Your probably a great guy, but when you speak thusly it sho don soun like it (speaking in moronic language)

"If you were referring to the public in general, you may be right. Of course those morons mostly don't believe in evolution either--which underlines the critical thought processes there."

This is another of "Lance's" many inaccurate arguments by assertion. Polls over decades have consistently shown that people who think UFOs are real craft and of ET origin or believe aliens exist tend to be more educated (college and professional degrees) than those who don't (high school and grade school educations).

The more educated also support evolutionary theory. It is the _less_ educated who tend to reject it. Overall a slight majority of the _American_ public accepts evolutionary theory. Not everybody is a "moron".

Polls are similar in other industrialized countries, except much larger majorities accept evolutionary theory. Still strong majorities believe aliens exist and usually modest majorities accept the ETH hypothesis for UFOs or believe UFOs are real (by "real", not just natural phenomena, misidentified secret military craft, etc.) Strong majorities in all polls believe governments are covering up or withholding information on UFOs.

Thus the _same_ population of better-educated tend to support _both_ evolutionary theory and the ETH.

"Lance", BTW, is almost certainly Viktor Golubik, who spouts exactly the same arrogant and inaccurate tripe over on UFO Updates. Viktor's key anti-Roswell arguments are all witnesses talking about an ET event are liars and if it wasn't in the 1947 newspapers then it never happened.

Thus if the newspapers failed to mention Brazel in military custody, it never happened, even though a dozen witnesses said otherwise, including provost martial Easley, who was in charge of detaining him. All these witnesses are liars or mistaken.

Therefore, you can take Brazel's newspaper balloon story to the bank. Never mind that he recanted it at the end or that it seriously conflicts with the base press release, the published comments of Wilcox, Marcel, and Ramey and what was shown in Fort Worth, or that it is also inconsistent in many ways with the modern Mogul balloon crash (what happened to all the balloon twine Viktor?) Viktor never seems to consider the possibility that Brazel was indeed coerced and coached on what to say.

If you don't think that the U.S. government doesn't sometimes plant cover stories in the newspapers for national security reasons, then you don't know American history. E.g., when the Soviets shot down the U-2 in 1960, the official story for several days was that it was an errant NASA weather plane. (weather plane, weather balloon--one's as good as the other) NASA further produced phony transcripts of the pilot's last moments as he supposedly passed out from oxygen deprivation.

If the Soviet's hadn't quickly exposed the sham and the U.S. government had gotten away with the lie (as was the case with U.S. spy balloons over the USSR in the early 1950s which we also lied about when the Soviets protested), then some other "Lance" today would probably still be proclaiming the U-2 was a weather plane, witnesses who said otherwise were all liars, the spy plane theory was a "myth", and cite the original government cover story in the newspapers as irrefutable supporting evidence.

David Rudiak tells us that because a number of 'witnesses' said (between 30 and 40 years afterwards) that Brazel was held in custody by the military, he was therefore held in custody by the military. No I don't believe it for a moment. It is another wild exaggerated fanciful tale going the rounds. Exactly what had this innocent civilian done to deserve such treatment? Answer: nothing. Nothing at all. The tale is a myth; a myth that has grown with the interviews over the years since Moore & Friedman first got onto the case in 1979, and reminds me of Glenn Dennis's 'dog food' tale. I don't doubt that Brazel was warned (advised) by the military to say as little as possible to the press, and to keep the 'saucer' tale under his hat and avoid publicity for his own good. Hence his silence after July 8. Very wise man!

And to say (as some have) that Brazel took the great ET secret to his grave is preposterous. (By the way, why no deathbed confession from him?).

The Roswell story, as Nick Redfern says, will never be solved to everyone's satisfaction. And whatever official sources say, they will, as a matter of course, be disbelieved, by ETHers. And the elusive hard evidence will, as always, remain hidden in official archives and vaults, perhaps forever and a day.

Incidentally, I only wrote this for one reason - to make it the 50th comment on this blog.

No high school diploma:*Strict creationist: 65%*Theistic evolution: 23%*Naturalistic evolution: 5%*(Some form of evolution): 28%

So belief in evolution strongly correlates with education, which should come as no great surprise. The same is true for people who "believe" in UFOs, aliens, etc., though not as strongly. When the educational distinction is made, a majority of the college-educated express such beliefs, and this is usually 15-20% more than those who have lesser education.

See also more recent 2007 Gallup poll at above link which also breaks down evolutionary views by educational background:

All people:*"Evolution" in some form: 49%*No evolution: 48%

(Virtually identical to results of Gallup's 1991 poll.)

Thus, as I said, slightly more accept evolution than don't (but basically a statistically draw)

By education, those who in believe in evolution:*Post graduate degrees: 74%*College degrees: 48%*Some college: 50%*High school or less: 41%

Of course, you can also read other polls on this site which have a majority expressing creationist views, such as the 2006 CBS poll where 55% are creationist, 27% believe in theistic evolution, and 13% naturalistic evolution.

But my point remains: the more educated population in the U.S. tends to accept both evolution and UFOs; the less educated do not. Lance instead was trying to claim people who thought there was something to UFOs and aliens were "morons" like the creationists.

----------Did you use the same rigorous standards that you applied to the Ramey memo?-----------

A lot more rigorous than our friend Lance here.

Incidentally, Lance previously claimed my reading of "disc" in the Ramey memo was totally arbitrary and biased. Actually, it is now the _unanimous_ read of everybody who has spent a little more than Lance's exhaustive 5 minutes looking at the memo to render his "expert" opinion. I first proposed "DISC" in 1999, not knowing that Brad Sparks, who first attempted to read the memo around 1985 (and who is a Roswell alien skeptic, BTW) independently read it the same way.

If Lance was really being "rigorous" he might bother to read the methodology section at my website where I explain in great detail how I went about attacking the memo. This involves a strongly linguistic approach to reading the memo instead of a simple-minded letter-by-letter approach of debunkers like Lance, so they can nit-pick the clarity and ambiguity of each and every letter, then argue nothing can be read.

Unlike computers, humans are very good at using our linguistic abilities to interpret natural language in everyday situations, such as following conversations in a noisy room or reading bad handwriting. You don't need to be able read or understand every letter, word, syllable, and phoneme in order to at least get a gist of what is being said or written. We are able to fill in many of the gaps using such things as our deep knowledge of English grammar, syntax, and knowledge of the subject matter.

In the case of the Ramey memo, when I speak of a linguistics approach I mean objectively counting the letters in the word, using English vocabulary and spelling, doing exhaustive word searches using clearer letters to find possible matches using real teletype font for comparison, apply English grammar and syntax to reduce the number of possible matches, and then apply further restrictions that the readings make sense (English semantics) and be in historical context. This, incidentally, is a common approach employed by cryptographers and intelligence agencies, several examples I can't detail here, but have previously been discussed in debates on the Ramey memo over on UFO Updates.

E.g. in the "DISC" word, the "IS" is actually quite clear, the "D" and "C" less so. But even if one only uses "IS", word searches produce only a limited number of possible 4-letter English words, some of which can be quickly eliminated by grammar (word is a noun), and only one ("DISC" or "DISK") makes any sense in the historical context and which would be surrounded by quote marks (quite common in July 1947, since the use of the term "flying disc" was less than 2 weeks old).

So quite contrary to Lance and other debunkers, there is nothing arbitrary or biased about the word "DISC" here. Also what's the big deal about the word "disc"? The Roswell base press release used the words "flying disc" and Ramey was also publicly referring to the object as a "disc", (though now claiming it was a radar target). They would use "disc" publicly but not privately?

But Lance thinks he knows better. Such a word would never appear here because he says so. I must have made it up because I'm so biased, lack all critical thinking, and obviously am not nearly as smart as he is.

You can also see my updated graphics and commentary on the "VICTIMS" word, one comparing it to alternate mundane readings like "REMAINS", "FINDING", "VIEWING", and one just introduced by cda here, "WITNESS":

http://www.roswellproof.com/Victim_compare.html

The second illustrates the use of word searches to find possible matches, and then using the linguistic and historical constraints to eliminate spurious matches:

http://www.roswellproof.com/Word_search.html

Make up your own minds as to whether "victims" is some totally arbitrary word that arises through pure wishful thinking.

I will leave it to others as to whether or not adding the phrase "among those expressing a preference" is a weaselly way to explain a rather embarrassing mistake... all I said was that most people don't believe in evolution and the reputable poll I cited (from THIS year) confirms that:

39% Do (thus 100%-39%=61% Don't)

I might even suggest that the "No Opinion" crowd is even stupider than the Creationist folks but I digress.

It is quite amusing to note the Gallup organization's own headline for the poll:

"On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution"

Sort of backs up my contention, don't you think? Or is everyone supposed to assume that you are a better authority on such matters than Gallup?

I realize that I come across as arrogant, but I doubt that it rises to this level.

Your point about education level was never an argument I was participating in--I certainly agree with it---it was sort of my point. Duh.

I note that your "almost certain" identification of me as someone I am not does not seem to enter into your latest post.

Are you at least "almost certain" about your Ramey text? That way I have a baseline:

Almost Certain=Completely Wrong.

Ok...now a half-assed apology:

I never claimed that your reading of "disc" was arbitrary. Indeed, I think is one of the reasonable guesses.

In my imaginary dialogue of your deciphering sessions, I was parodying the bias that I think guided the resulting text. I should not be so flippant. The work you have done is considerable and admirable. Your conclusions are, I believe unsupported.

But they are more than just wishful thinking.

I did not know that my guess of "finding" for what you call "victims" was a common conclusion. Seeing that people read many different words in the same blob, I am thus even more convinced that almost all of the words are impossible to conclusively discern (at least from the scan you obtained) as long as one is being honest with himself.

I also wanted to say that I thought the whole idea of attempting to read the Ramey memo was brilliant. It is sad that the results are so poor.

As I said in a earlier post, I can see why one might look at the scans of the memo and be SURE that it is readable. The text is right there in front of you but, like a will-o-the-wisp, just out of reach.

Is it possible that a high rez scan might be made from the original negative instead of from an 8x10 print?

I wrote:"The closest you can come to 'Japanese' is a few descriptions of the eyes being slanted and having a somewhat Asian look. A few described yellowish skin. That's about it."------------Nick Redfern responded:No: Beverly Bean, the daughter of Melvin Brown, said of her father's viewing of the bodies:

"He told us they were nothing to be scared of. They were friendly-looking and had nice faces. THEY LOOKED ASIAN, he said, but had larger heads and no hair. They looked a yellowy color. He was frightened a bit because he knew he shouldn’t be doing it, so he only had a quick glimpse. But he said THEY COULD HAVE PASSED FOR CHINESE-THEY HAD SLANTED EYES."

To say someone could have "passed for Chinese" is pretty definitive. To pass for a Chinese person, you would have to look, well, pretty much Chinese.-----------------Here we have Nick engaged in a little selective quotation. Here are other Bev Bean quotes:

"They were smaller than a normal man with large heads and slanted eyes. He also said they looked yellowish, a bit Asian... [Source: Leonard Stringfield, Status Report V, January 1989; Timothy Good, "Alien Contact", 1991]

In another statement, Bean said her father described the alien bodies this way:

"He said they were smaller than a normal man--about four feet--and had much larger heads than us,with slanted eyes, and that the bodies looked yellowish, a bit Asian-looking." [Friedman and Berliner, "Crash at Corona", 1992]

Nick's selective quotation is obviously misleading. Bean also said she was told they were about 4 feet tall, had overly large heads and were a "bit" Asian-looking with slanted eyes. Some superficial similarities (slanted eyes, yellowish skin) doesn't make them Japanese or Chinese. Were Japanese kamikaze pilots typically four feet tall with oversized heads?

---------It depends whose witness testimony we accept re their descriptions of the bodies.

---------No, just about every single description, first or second-hand mentions the small bodies about 4 feet tall with oversized heads. Other common descriptions were unusually large and slanted eyes, slit for a mouth, nostrils but no nose or only a hint of a nose, holes for eyes, or only hint of ears, absence of any body hair, overly long arms. ---------Which specifically first-hand witnesses to the bodies do you cite as suppporting the alien angle?----------Nick uses Bev Bean's (selective quotation) 2nd-hand descriptions as supporting evidence that they were Chinese. But I'm restricted to only 1st-hand? Isn't that a double standard?

Well, here's Walter Haut's affidavit:"...from a distance, I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin. ...The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a 10 year old child. At a later date in Blanchard's office, he would extend his arm about 4 feet above the floor to indicate the height."

Pvt. "Eli Benjamin" ["Witness to Roswell"]"...one of the gurneys slipped during the handoff, and the sheet covering fell away, revealing the grayish face and swollen, hairless head of a species that I realized was not human. [At base hospital from a distance] ...I could see well enough to make out that a very small person with an egg-shaped head that was oversized for its body was lying on the gurney. The only facial features that stick out in my mind now are that it had slanted eyes, two holes where its nose should have been, and a small slit where its mouth should have been."

Army photographer Frederick Benthal:

("Crash at Corona")"You'd go in this tent, which was awful dark... Seemed to me [the bodies] were all just about identical. Dark complected. I remember they was thin, and it looked like they had too big of a head."

("Witness to Roswell") "[The bodies] were all just about identical, with dark complexions, thin and with large heads."

Second hand:

Family of Oliver Henderson:Wife Sappho Henderson (affidavit):"He described the beings as small with large heads for their size."

Daughter Mary Groode (affidavit):"He described the alien beings as small and pale, with slanted eyes and large heads. He said they were humanoid-looking, but different from us."

Pete and Ruben Anaya recalled Lt. Governor Joseph Montoya telling them the alien beings were small and pale, with slanted eyes and large heads, again humanoid-looking, but different from us.

Frankie Rowe recalled her father, fireman Dan Dwyer, telling the family that he saw three non-human beings at the crash site, one alive and walking around. It was the size of a ten-year-old child and had no hair. It had very small ears and large dark eyes.

Larry Rowlette and Carlene Green, son and daughter of Sgt. Homer Rowlette said he told them on his deathbed of seeing “three little people” with large heads, which he referred to as "the Greys." At least one was alive.

Barbara Dugger, granddaughter of Sheriff George Wilcox, said in her affidavit that her grandmother Inez told her the sheriff "sawfour 'space beings.' One of the little men was alive. Their heads were large."

The four sons of Lt. Col. Marion Magruder said he talked on his deathbed of seeing a live alien at Wright Field, described in "Witness to Roswell" as a "creature" under 5 feet tall, "human-like" but with longer arms, larger eyes, and an oversized, hairless head. It had a slit for a mouth and two holes but no appendages for a nose and ears. It was clearly nonhuman and "came from another planet."

More comparison of body testimony and links (along with Leonard Stringfield's composite drawing of the alien described by his Wright-Patterson medical sources):http://www.roswellproof.com/Dennis.htmlhttp://www.roswellproof.com/Henderson.html

I have yet to read any body testimony, first or other-hand where anybody thought they were dealing with human beings, much less deformed Chinese or Japanese kamikaze pilots.

David Rudiak tells us that because a number of 'witnesses' said (between 30 and 40 years afterwards) that Brazel was held in custody by the military, he was therefore held in custody by the military. No I don't believe it for a moment. It is another wild exaggerated fanciful tale going the rounds. Exactly what had this innocent civilian done to deserve such treatment? Answer: nothing. Nothing at all.The tale is a myth; a myth that has grown with the interviews over the years since Moore & Friedman first got onto the case in 1979.--------------Translation: It didn't happen because Christopher Allen doesn't believe it happened.

Note the use by cda of "witnesses" in quotes and the use of the word "myth", the way it is usually used by debunkers when talking about Roswell. In other words, its all fictional, exaggerated, and made up.

Yes, son Bill Brazel made it up, friends and neighbors Loretta Proctor, Floyd Proctor, Marion Strickland, Lyman Strickland, Leonard Porter, Bill Jenkins, J.D. Sparks made it up, reporters Jason Kellahin and Frank Joyce made it up, Roswell Daily Record Editor Paul McEvoy made it up, and my favorite, Roswell provost marshal Edwin Easley admitting to Kevin Randle that they held Brazel at the base under armed guard for several days.

Yep, never happened. Either Easley was lying for no damned good reason (he would have been admitting to possibly criminal activity, holding a civilian against their will) or Kevin was lying about Easley saying this. Now I've had very serious disagreements with Kevin, but I also very seriously doubt he would make this up.

This is what I love about debunkers. In the end all they have is their denial. Everybody is a liar and it didn't happen because they say it didn't happen.

-----cda:Incidentally, I only wrote this for one reason - to make it the 50th comment on this blog.----

How typically cda and how refreshingly honest! Never has anything useful to say and just likes to hear himself talk.

To DR:Instead of constantly quoting the number of witnesses who talked decades later about Brazel's imprisonment by the military, why not read p 168-171 of Karl Pflock's 2001 book. He has a perfectly reasonable answer for what happened. Are we to really accept that Brazel was held in custody at the AF base for varying periods (periods from one day to 8 days have been bandied about) or have these witnesses simply, 30-40 years afterwards, exaggerated and fabricated what really took place? More important, why on earth was Brazel kept in custody by the military at all? What had he done to deserve this treatment? DR does not tell us because he knows there is no credible reason for it. Kevin does not answer this either. Civilians are NOT kept in custody by the military without very good cause. Or was the Roswell base an early Guantanimo Bay?

The idea is absurd. I repeat: it is more than likely that the military wanted (and advised) Brazel to avoid publicity for his own sake and spoke to him for a an hour or so. Otherwise the 'custody' seems to have been when he stayed with Walt Whitmore in Roswell for one or two nights, as per Pflock's book. (See his chapter 14 which is called "The Terror and other Exaggerations"). I repeat my question to both DR and KR: What was Brazel held in military custody for? Had he committed a crime? (in which case the local police ought to have dealt with it, not the Air Force). We have all these 'witnesses' saying things about Brazel, yet none have ever suggested a reason for his alleged incarceration.

No, Brazel did not take his 'great secret' to the grave. And no he did not, thank goodness, make a deathbed confession either.And, as far as we know, he never once complained to his congressman or senator about this imprisonment.

He merely kept his mouth shut after July 8 over this incident, because he realised how trivial it all was. Good for him.

Oh and I am not a debunker. I am merely a non-ETHer. There is a difference!

"the whole point of introducing cover stories is to create covers that are not controversial, because such extreme controversies may well cause unwarrented attention."

Yes indeed, which is why MOGUL and the crash dummies were the earlier, preferred covers. But the catch is, they just don't work well enough. AFAIK the syphilis and plutonium disclosures didn't create such a tremendous ruckus, even though they revealed the victimization of thousands of US citizens.The Japanese story involves the alleged sacrifice of a few POWs from an "aggressor state" (or deformed people) and therefore isn't that big a deal, especially without official admission. Controversial as it may be, it is still plausible as a cover of last resort, when you consider the possible consequences of not keeping ET covered up. You say people generally don't care about UFOs. But the '38 broadcast shows what might happen if people believe the ETs are coming here.

"why not say it was American pilots flying a new aircraft ...early rocket tests with monkeys?"

But where's the documentation to support stories like that? At least MOGUL was in NM at the relevant time. So were some deformed people, no doubt, not that it really proves anything. As KDR noted in one of his books, the flying wing wasn't in NM. The difference between claims of American and Japanese dead is that the latter are more likely to remain nameless. Had they said US pilots died, investigators would demand to know who they were etc etc. Moreover Americans are generally too tall and too recognizable as humans to make such a story believable. Monkeys wouldn't work either because they have too much body hair. Japanese (or deformed people) would seem more consistent with the body descriptions as they are relatively short with less hair.I think that, if the ET proponents were unchallenged, people would accept their account as factual, in which case, before long, pressure would mount for disclosure. For years already certain groups have attempted to pressure our leaders despite all the obfuscation; without it, they'd be much stronger and many politicians would cater to them to get votes. The ridicule factor would be much less if the ET version was thought to be the only plausible one. Why ridicule what appears to be an established fact? Right now I think most people would say they don't know what crashed at Roswell. Ergo, pressure to get at the truth is limited. Cover stories have made the difference; the whole issue is under control.

While "disk" was a common spelling, it is hard to argue along the lines you suggested.

Perhaps more telling is the way Rudiak explains away the quotation marks around the word. You often find the marks used to denote when something is being called out in name only. As when I call Bill Birnes a UFO "hunter".

If "disc" is really the actual text in the memo, it suggests that perhaps there was no actual disc and that the Army knew this. Of course I expect one humdinger of an "explanation" as to why my suggestion is completely wrong.

To paraphrase John Wayne in “The Horse Soldiers,” “I didn’t want this. I tried to avoid a fight,” but having my words twisted around has gone on long enough.

I didn’t say that it was impossible for Ramey to have held up a highly classified document so that a civilian photographer could take a picture of it. I said it was unlikely. I said that military officers are trained to protect classified information. What is wrong with this assessment?

I said that General Miller did not give away the date of the Normandy Invasion which he did not. I did not say that his blunder wasn’t terrible, only that he had not given away the date of the invasion... and that everyone knew an invasion of Europe was coming. The Germans were preparing for it. They were erecting defenses all along the French coast. (Of course, they though it would come at narrowest part of the channel at Calis rather than the widest at Normandy, but we’re not having a discussion on tactics.)

Yes, I have said, in the past, that we don’t know that the document relates to Roswell. We suspect, given the timing and location but there are other aspects that need to be considered. And no, the interpretation that the words “Roswell” and “Disc” are not universally accepted as being in the message.

Others, for example, said that the area where David said Roswell, they said it was Magdalena or Carlsbad. Where he said Disc, they said Else. The interpretations are not universal.

Don Burleson wrote in the January 7, 2000 issue of Vision, the monthly magazine published by the Roswell Daily Record, “A number of attempts have been made to read the Ramey letter. Quite frankly, most of these are amateurish, and even some UFOlogists have concluded there is nothing in the Ramey image that advances the case for the Roswell incident. They are mistaken.”

Another study, reported in the Minnesota MUFON Journal, in issue #102 and dated July/Aug 2003, provides an interesting diversion from the classical interpretation. Bill McNeff and Glenn Fishbine decided they too would attempt to read the Ramey Memo and their results change, to some extent, the importance of it.

They note that theirs is a preliminary study and then wrote, “Ten different types of image restoration techniques were employed in an effort to make this message more readable. They are highly technical and will not be detailed in this article.”

Which, of course, opens them up for criticism simply because we can ask, how valid are their techniques if they don’t tell us what they are. It can also be noted that sometimes a detailed description of the technical aspects of a study inhibit the reporting of it, and, they do provide some clues about what they looked at in their study.

David, for example, made some assumptions that are important to his interpretation of the memo. McNeff and Fishbine wrote, “First of all, we do not agree with the ‘established’ character count, especially at the end because of the creases [in the memo].

“Second, while we agree with the interpretation of some letters found by others, there are a significant # (sic) of cases where their reading of a letter was a reading of a film grain pattern. In some cases we were able to find text in the grain background. Also, some of the other readings came from grain patterns above, below, or to the right of the actual letters. Third, a lot of the readings came from what looks like a photoshop gaussian blur of one of the original scans. That kind of blur creates some amazing artifacts & (sic) psychological interpretations. We avoided the blurring at all costs.”

So now we have another study like that done by Russ Estes, that is suggesting that people might be seeing what they want to see. In fact, the key word, “victims” is not one that they identified. They wrote, in discussing their methods, “It was especially good on a few letters. It brought out the E in REMAINS very clearly.”

That is “remains” instead of “victims.” Rather than seeing “The victims of the wreck,” they saw, “The remains of the wreck...” And that changes the meaning because remains could refer to the weather balloon debris rather than living creatures that were killed.

David had reported that victims was the only word that fit into context of the six letter word that began with a “v”. What could the word be if it was not victims? But if the first letter is an artifact of blurring and psychological interpretation, then David’s argument based on the first letter being a “v” is flawed.

We, and here I mean James Houran and I, ran an experiment about priming, meaning, were some of those looking at the memo predisposed to certain interpretations based on what they heard about it before they examined it?

With my help, he gathered a cross section of people to review photographic enlargements of message. There were three groups and three conditions. One group was told that the message related to the Roswell UFO crash. One group was told that the memo related to atomic testing. And the control group was told nothing about the contents, only asked if they could read any of the words.Yes, there were some words that were made out easily. Fort Worth, Tex., weather baloons (sic) and the like. But the critical word, that is, victims, was not seen by any of the subjects. And, those who were told the message was about an atomic test rather than a spaceship crash saw words like flash, which related to the atomic test but that has surfaced in none of the interpretations of the message by UFO researchers.

This suggests that “priming” or contamination, might have some affect one what people see. The results were laid out in an article for the Journal of Scientific Exploration in the Spring, 2002 issue.

There is one problem, or rather one that some of the proponents of reading the message make about the experiment. Through error, one of the student assistants threw out the raw data after copying it onto the score sheets. Yes, the raw data should have been saved, but then the data, in a finer state was preserved. Does this negate the experiment? No.

Now, we must expect those reviewing our data will accept that the raw data was transcribed properly and without error. While there is no evidence that any of the numbers were fudged, and those running the experiment did not know what results were expected, it does throw a bit of a cloud over the work.

I suppose I should also note that the time each of the subjects spent trying to read the message was about twenty minutes. David pointed out that he had spent months on his work, that he used the best copies of the photographs possible and the best computer programs. It’s not quite the same as a student trying to read the message off a computer screen in twenty minutes. His work should count for more.

But the point is that without priming, no one identified the critical word, which is victims. None of them. Though they were using some of the best images available they were unable to see that specific word. This suggests that a second experiment should be preformed to determine the validity of the results of those reading the Ramey memo.

So, the experiment conducted suggested that priming might have lead to some researchers seeing the critical word victims. But it should also be noted that researchers did, independently, pick out some of the more obscured words. In fact, David, in an email to me suggested there was more consensus than disagreement among those researchers. And he notes that there is more agreement in context than there is in precise wording.

Or, in other words, contrary to what David said, the acceptance of his interpretation of the Ramey memo is not universal. And the results have not been independently duplicated.

For crying out loud, you are rejecting testimony because you don't believe it. You don't like the fact that so many others told us that Mack Brazel was held at the base for a number of days. This includes his son, his neighbors and even Edwin Easley, the base provost marshal... who, if you wanted to argue bias would have said that they didn't hold him there. Easley even told me that Brazel was held in the guest house.

So, you want to know why... because he had seen something that he shouldn't have seen. They wanted to ensure that the media couldn't find him and interview him after he gave his little speech at the Roswell Daily Record. They also made sure that Marcel wasn't around and they told the sheriff not to talk because they couldn't control him the way they could an officer or a rancher.

Your only response is that we have this testimony from people 30 or 40years after the fact. So what? It is consistent across the board. Even Bessie Brazel recanted her story.

So, believe or don't, but you are now rejecting testimony for no other reason than it doesn't fit into your world view.

I will note that this does not lead us to the extraterrestrial, only that it takes us into th very important and Mogul doesn't make that cut. Why not? Because they burned Mogul in the newspapers starting on July 10. They didn't care about Mogul.

Re my comments on whether or not an official or unofficial sanction of the Japanese angle would be considered, you said:

"Yes indeed, which is why MOGUL and the crash dummies were the earlier, preferred covers. But the catch is, they just don't work well enough."

Eh??? Didn't work well enough? Didn't work well enough on who exactly?

Most of the media accepted the Mogul theory - it most certainly worked well enough on them, and for them.

And although some of the media most certainly did ask questions about the credibility of the "dummies" report, not much was done at all by them to investigate it - to where they outright denounced it. They commented on some of the inconsistencies and then went back to regular news reporting - and forgot all about Mogul and crash-test dummies.

So, again: when you say re Mogul and the dummies that "they just don't work well enough" as cover stories, what do you mean? "Well enough" for who?

The media largely did not do anything meaningful to investigate and dismiss such scenarios.

The GAO could not get past the Mogul cover, neither could Schiff. Now, whether all the GAO people involved privately still might have felt that the Mogul story wasn't satisfactory, nothing has been done by them since 1994 (when the AF statement about Mogul came out) to try and dig further.

So, the Mogul cover worked perfectly well on all of the above people/agences/news outlets.

So, are you saying that the Mogul and dummy scenarios didn't work well enough to convince the UFO research community?

If you are saying this, it's largely pointless, because the AF would have known from the word "go" that the UFO community would never accept any statement from the AF on Roswell - unless it vindicated the ETH.

Plus, as the UFO research community only has witness testimony and no physical evidence of Roswell, it doesn't actually matter if the covers worked or not (in terms of being believed) - because as interesting as witness testimony can be, at the end of the day it isn't what we need to break the case wide open: the only thing that will ever do this is a body, a piece of a craft, an undeniable autopsy AF document etc. We don't have that.

You then say re the Japanese angle: "Controversial as it may be, it is still plausible as a cover of last resort, when you consider the possible consequences of not keeping ET covered up."

But you are again missing the point: the government has no problem hiding the secret.

If there really is ET debris and bodies from Roswell stored away somewhere (and that has been successfully stored away for more than 60 years), then clearly the government has all this material in a "lock-down" situation, where it is confident that nothing will ever surface into the public domain.

Consider this: if the Mogul story is a lie (rather than the AF's best attempt to solve Roswell 50 years later), do you really think the AF would lie to the GAO, to Schiff etc, if they were not supremely confident that no-one could ever get to the hard evidence?

No they would not.

So, if no-one can get to the hard evidence, all the AF has to do is put out its Mogul story and say: "This is what we think came down, we don't have any documents though. But for us it's now case-closed. Now, go away and leave us alone." Which is exactly what they have done.

There's no need to create another cover (Japanese or whatever) when the AF has Mogul and the dummies in place, and when (as per my comments above) any alleged ET materials from Roswell are held so tight by whoever might have access to them, that they know we can't get that material anyway.

The unfortunate thing is that there are some highly credible people who have spoken out about Roswell being the subject of a big cover-up, but if none of them can deliver the goods (a body etc), then sadly it's just words.

And as intersting as witness words are, the AF knows no-one (such as influential media outlets) outside of our small community will ever sit up and take real notice of that testimony unless the witness words are backed up by something more - but that hasn't happened.

In conclusion, the very important thing to remember is this: just because the UFO research community may not believe the Mogul or dummy stories, does not mean that this somehow threatens the Government's ability to keep the truth hidden.

Only material evidence from the crash itself could ever threaten the official world's stance - and no-one has that evidence - aside from (if it exists) the people on the inside.

Kevin:I have every right to reject testimony as worthless if I so wish. I do not know your real stance on Brazel's alleged incarceration. Are you saying he was kept prisoner against his will (with an armed guard)? Or are you simply saying he was invited to be a guest at the base for a few days and told what he may or may not say to the press and investigators? There is quite a difference here.

You say Brazel "had seen something he shouldn't have seen". Like what? If he had seen fragments of some supersecret USAF development then OK the military would have been very concerned, and would have spent some time with him (perhaps several hours, but most certainly not several days). But had he seen ET debris, are you seriously claiming this stuff was something "he shouldn't have seen"?

This is plain silly. What business is it of the military to tell civilians what ET artifacts they may or may not see and handle? Does the USAF dictate, for example, whether Brazel, or anyone else, should handle meteorites? And remember that in July 1947 the USAF had absolutely no knowledge of ETs, had no procedures set up for dealing with such things and would have been as baffled by it all as any civilian. So you can discount the idea that the reason Brazel was told to keep his mouth shut (if he ever was) was because he had handled ET debris. It makes no sense, none at all.

While on this topic, look at this quote from your "The Truth about...." page 75. After talking about Edwin Easley, you and Schmitt write: "At Roswell, the government went after everyone who knew anything with threats of prison or death. Agents threatened entire families, expressing a willingness to murder children". Really? In peacetime? From whom did you glean this startling (mis)information? Presumably the same or similar witnesses you now say told you about Brazel.Come on Kevin. Did you really write this? After 15years, do you still believe what you wrote?Nor am I quoting out of context, as on p 76 appears: "The testimony to this aspect of the case [i.e. death threats against families] is overwhelming". (!)

I mention this because it is all relevant to Brazel's imprisonment, and the idea that private citizens, even children, were threatened by the US military.

As I said, Karl Pflock had some strong (and negative)words to say about all this. So have I, but I won't spend any more time on it here.

Now you know why I reject testimony that "doesn't fit into [my] world view".

CDA said, "And remember that in July 1947 the USAF had absolutely no knowledge of ETs, had no procedures set up for dealing with such things and would have been as baffled by it all as any civilian."

And you are certain of this? There were many incidences prior to 1947, namely during, and just after the war. It is not certain, to this day, what groups like the IPU did, in their short lives, but not impossible that they dealt with such matters.

MOGUL can't account for the bodies reported by a number of witnesses. Obviously, this was deemed a serious enough deficiency for the government to invoke crash dummies, but that was silly. The Japanese story was apparently then invoked as a potentially better cover.

"just because the UFO research community may not believe the Mogul or dummy stories does not mean that this somehow threatens the Government's ability to keep the truth hidden."

The UFO research community has obviously imparted its findings and its views to countless millions of people (via many popular books, lectures, and the internet). It's not just a "research community" but a fair proportion of the public. Like I said before, even with all the attempts to make Roswell seem a mundane or Earthly event, a substantial number of people are getting on the government's back, via the Disclosure project etc. Just imagine what the pressure might be like if the ET view of Roswell was unchallenged and generally deemed factual! This is a democracy, where government can't necessarily resist mass public clamoring. It has to forestall it, partly by means of cover stories.

"do you really think the AF would lie to the GAO, Schiff etc if they were not supremely confident that no-one would ever see the hidden evidence."

"Supremely confident" or not, for various reasons they feel they have no choice but to hide it. Obfuscation is an essential part of that effort.

You say: "The UFO research community has obviously imparted its findings and its views to countless millions of people (via many popular books, lectures, and the internet). It's not just a 'research community' but a fair proportion of the public."

But so what? Imparting findings to millions (which I agree has indeed occurred) has done nothing to definitively prove what happened at Roswell.

Millions of people go to church on sundays and hear the priest impart data of a religious nature. But not a single one of those priests can prove there is any such thing as a god - and that's after 2,000 years!!! And no priest could ever prove it without evidence - for which no-one has ever seen any (unless you accept such nonsense as faces of saints in bowls of vegetable soup, or images of the Virgin Mary on a dog turd).

You say: "A substantial number of people are getting on the government's back, via the Disclosure project etc."

That's true. But I come back to what I said before: if (as you believe) ET crashed at Roswell, those tasked with hiding this evidence won't release it because a bunch of UFO researchers demand that they release it!

As I also said before, neither Schiff nor the GAO could get anywhere. Disclosure is a noble project and idea. It's a naive belief to think that it can actually work.

You say: "Just imagine what the pressure might be like if the ET view of Roswell was unchallenged and generally deemed factual!"

But numerous people (maybe even millions, if the public was polled on a wide scale) DO already believe that the ET angle of Roswell is factual!

But (once again) without the hard evidence to back that belief up, Roswell will never be more than something that obsesses the UFO community, becomes occasional fodder for TV shows, etc.

You say: "This is a democracy, where government can't necessarily resist mass public clamoring."

The day I see "mass public clamoring" for the truth about Roswell is the day I will admit that maybe the pushes of the Disclosure people might work.

However, do you seriously believe that the public will band together on a massive scale and demand the truth about Roswell?

No, of course they won't! Most people are (quite rightly) far more concerned about surviving the current economy, keeping their jobs, paying for healthcare, etc etc etc.

The idea that the public will rise up en-masse to demand the Roswell truth be revealed is an interesting one, but one that just will not happen.

"Imparting findings to millions....has done nothing to definitively prove what happened at Roswell."

Of course not, because of the coverup. But had it not been for obfuscation, researchrs could've convinced a LOT more people of the ET story, potentially leading to irrresistable pressure to disclose.

"those tasked with hiding the evidence won't release it because a bunch of UFO researchers demand that they release it!"

Yes indeed, as long as, thanks to obfuscation, the demand emanates from a relatively small group of well informed people, it won't be enough.

"...neither Schiff nor the GAO could get anywhere."

Right, without sufficient public backing.

"But numerous people....DO already believe that the ET angle of Roswell is factual!"

In fact, given all the outwardly convincing talk of MOGUL etc, not very many people are really certain or confident of this. As long as that is the case, the extent and determination of disclosure efforts will remain severely limited.

"do you seriously believe the public will rise forth on a massive scale and demand the truth about Roswell?"

In fact no, the government's effort has essentially achieved its purpose.

We're pretty much repeating ourselves now on this matter, but I will say this:

In your latest, you say:

"But had it not been for obfuscation, researchrs could've convinced a LOT more people of the ET story, potentially leading to irrresistable pressure to disclose."

Correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to think that if a lot of people push for the Roswell truth, then those tasked with hiding it will just go ahead and release it after 62 years of keeping it one of the world's most classified secrets??!!

That is so naive.

You also should try and understand the critical issue that 99.999 per cent of the general public DOES NOT CARE enough about UFOs to rise up en-masse etc, and they won't care enough to do that until (or unless) UFOs appear en-masse, on the White House Lawn, etc - and that has never happened.

Most people are too busy getting on with their normal, day-to-day lives without having to think about writing en-masse to their congressmen, etc, or marching on Washington, etc about UFOs.

Something like 80 million people voted for their favorite singers on American Idol last week.

It's things like this that galvanize the public - things that entertain them, things in their everyday lives that make them pick up the phone and vote for this singer or that singer.

That's the reality. Some people may not like to hear it, but the truth is that far more people are interested in their favorite singers on AI than they are in trying to find out what happened in the deserts of New Mexico in 1947.

Since you use the name "Starman," I don't know if you are well-known in the UFO field or not. If not, I will tell you this: behind the scenes, there are some tremendous egos within UFology.

I have seen famous Ufologists huffing and puffing with their own self-importance at conferences, thinking that the world is just waiting for them to get to the truth.

Well, I have news for them: the world outside of Ufology is not waiting. The world has far more important things to deal with than Roswell, such as unemployment, the economy, their mortgages, crime, health-care, the environment - the list goes on and on.

And I can assure you that Roswell is probably near the very bottom of most people's lists - if it's even on it at all (which I highly doubt).

And there is one very critical issue you are forgetting:

If the USAF had told Schiff, or the GAO etc that "Yes, we have Roswell files, but you can't see them; they are still classified, so go away," then of course there could be a push to get this material released. Such a statement from the USAF would have been major news.

But, that isn't what happened: rather, the official stance is that the USAF (as well as quite a few other agencies too, you will recall from the GAO report) said they checked high and low and they could find not find any Roswell files (aside from the FBI's teletype and one or two other minor things).

That's the problem with Roswell. And here's what I mean: remember those NSA UFO files that the NSA refused to release for years, and the blacked-out NSA documents that Stan Friedman shows at his lectures?

The reason why they eventually surfaced was because even though the NSA wouldn't release them for years, the NSA DID admit they existed.

So, pressure was put on by Ufology to have them released.

But you can't put pressure on the official world to release its Roswell files when the official world (USAF, CIA, NSA, FBI etc etc), have all officially gone on the record (to the GAO, no less) as saying they have checked and have ZERO files.

Without leverage (such as an admittance that such material exists, but you can't see it - as was the case with the NSA files), there's no way forward via Disclosure-type pressure.

The only way the Roswell truth could ever come out (and whatever the truth may be) is via unpredictable means, or in a fashion that the official world hasn't anticipated, such as:

1. A whistleblower currently involved in hiding the Roswell truth who decides to leak something definitive;

2. An old-timer who held on to something (documentation, a piece of metal, a photo etc) years ago and decides to reveal it now;

3. An accidental release of documentation that perhaps includes a reference to Roswell that then opens the floodgates.

But asking the Government to release its files, or demanding the Government releases its files will never work - whether that demand is by a couple of hundred ufologists or half the country.

I'm being hypothetical re the following: but if Roswell was ET, there would be far more at stake than just the case itself. It would open floodgates to major media pressure for data on lots of other aspects of the UFO issue. The official world would know that.

The press would be asking: "Well, now we know Roswell was real, what about abductions? Are people really being kidnapped and implanted? And if so, why?"

To answer your questions, we have testimony from Frankie Rowe suggesting she, and her family were threatened by...

Oh, wait, you disregard her testimony because Karl Pflock talked to other fire fighters who claimed they knew nothing about this... except when I reinterviewed them, I learned that Karl had not asked all the relevant questions. I learned that an officer from the base came out and told them their help wasn't needed and not to go out there. Dan Dwyer, according to the fire fighter, did and that would have changed the dynamic, meaning that someone visited the family.

Could Frankie, as a 12-year-old girl have misinterpreted what was said to her? Sure. Does that mean she wasn't visited? No.

We have testimony from the family of Sheriff Wilcox saying they were threatened... but, of course, this doesn't count because the threats weren't made directly to the daughters, but to the sheriff and his wife, so we can disregard this as well.

We also know that others, such as the military men were threatened... which is, of course, one interpretation of the mandatory meetings in which these soldiers were told that if they talked they would have stiff fines and jail time.

Who said this? Edwin Easley said that he was told not to talk about it. Others have said the same things.

As for Mack Brazel, we have a huge number of people telling us he was held at the base. Easley said it was in the guest house, which isn't really jail... except it was clear that Brazel was not free to come and go. Was the door locked? Don't know. Was there a guard on the door? Don't know. Just that he was held on the base.

And yes, we're far beyond the largest number of comments on a blog posting here. I'm surprised because I thought this was a rather tame blog posting but it has taken off in a couple of directions and I learned that if I try to move it more mainstream, then it kills the discussion...

Nick -

I would like to do something with your update to Body Snatchers and will meet you privately about it soon, I hope.

"..you seem to think that if a lot of people push for the Roswell truth, then those tasked with hiding it will just go ahead and release it..."

I doubt it myself but depending on how many people demanded it and how determined they were, it is conceivable. This is after all a democracy. Why take a chance, why not be proactive? The government undoubtedly seeks to avoid such pressure in the first place via obfuscation.

"99.999 per cent of the general public DOES NOT CARE enough about UFOs to rise up en masse etc.."

Two points: first, even a small minority (if it is determined and passionate)can generate a great deal of political pressure--more than enough to have a profound effect on policy. The vast majority of Americans don't know or care anything about the Mideast. Generally only the pro-Israel groups care a great deal. They represent the views of maybe 1-2% of the public. But they're virtually dominant on Capitol Hill. Second, if people don't seem to care a great deal about UFOs, this is largely a result of obfuscation e.g. MOGUL. There's no way most people, even those interested in Roswell, are going to be motivated enough to do much of anything as long as there appears to be so much uncertainty and confusion about the case, and the phenomenon generally. Had the ET version been the only one offerred or accepted, pressure to get at the hidden info would be much stronger. Even if the effort weren't bound to succeed, the government obviously would prefer to prevent such a situation in the first plac--by muddying the waters.

"you can't put pressure on the official world...when the official world...saying they have ZERO files."

THE RANDLE REPORT mentions one rsearcher who, seeking the Roswell morning reports, was first told they didn't exist (were destroyed)but he persisted and eventually got them. I fully agree that releasing the truth about an ET Roswell would "open the floodgates." It is precisely to help prevent this situation that the government has resorted to obfuscation.

You say re demanding the truth: "I doubt it myself but depending on how many people demanded it and how determined they were, it is conceivable."

No it's not: because the official stance is that no files exist - so the Government can invoke that card each time: "Look, we have searched and searched for you and we have nothing."

It's a great card for them to play because by officially saying to the GAO and to Schiff that absolutely no Roswell files exist, they are not then nor now in the position of having to find ways to fight off attempts to get this material released.

You also say: "Why not be proactive?"

I agree: we should be proactive. And that's why all of us should still search for the answers to Roswell and the larger UFO mystery.

But my point is that being proactive in the field of disclosure is a waste of effort and time. We need to find another entry point to the truth, and be proactive there.

If the Roswell answer comes, it will not be via pushing the Government to reveal the truth - it can only come in an unconventional manner that is unanticipated by those hiding the truth.

You say: "If people don't seem to care a great deal about UFOs, this is largely a result of obfuscation e.g. MOGUL."

You're kidding here, right?

The fact that most people don't care about UFOs has nothing to do with obfuscation! It's simply that most people are just not interested - period!

For example, my wife finds the whole subject deathly boring. She knows nothing about Roswell, aside from the basics that everyone knows: something crashed in the desert, and the government covered it up.

But her lack of interest isn't due to obfuscation - it's just due to the fact that she has no interest in stories of aliens, outer space and cover-ups etc.

And that's fine, and that's also how it is for most of the population. They don't care about UFOs because they just aren't interested. Sometimes the simple explanation is the correct one.

You say: "THE RANDLE REPORT mentions one rsearcher who, seeking the Roswell morning reports, was first told they didn't exist (were destroyed)but he persisted and eventually got them."

So what? Getting "morning reports" pales into complete and utter insignificance when placed against (hypothetically) getting a 120-page July 1947 alien autopsy report/analysis.

No-one is saying there aren't documents available from the Roswell base from 1947 - it's significant 1947 documents on the incident that aren't available. That's 2 very different things, and 2 very different kinds of documentation.

You say: "I fully agree that releasing the truth about an ET Roswell would 'open the floodgates.' It is precisely to help prevent this situation that the government has resorted to obfuscation."

And it's precisely why - if the ET angle is true - disclosure would not happen, and would not be allowed to happen.

As I have said before, there is one thing we need to think very carefully about: if the Mogul and crash-dummy stories are lies (rather than genuine attempts to find the truth), then this means that the GAO and Schiff were lied to on a massive scale.

Now, if they WERE all lied to, this suggests one key thing: that the hard evidence has to be buried so deeply that the USAF had to have been super-confident that no-one would ever (and I do mean ever) find it.

Which is another reason why loftily demanding that the Government reveals the truth won't work.

We need an alternative route to find the truth - and the disclosure route is the wrong route, and it's a time-wasting route based on misguided (but admittedly well-meaning and honest) faith that it could actually succeed.

It is my understanding A&E might not air a Season 4 of UFO Hunters! Here is the e-mail address to contact A&E (I hope to request the show be continued) and/or here is the link to an on-line petition to continue the show:

Kevin;Sorry for the late comment, it's already June!Beyond Gen Ramey and his memo, I get particularly upset because no one I'm aware of really looks at the simple timeline of Mac Brazels' Sunday the 6ths trip to town and the announcement of the captured disk on the 8th. Mac came to Roswell to make a report, on Sunday, July 6. Holdiay weekend or no, has anyone traced when the Pentagon/Washington was alerted to this report? The idea that Blanchard -on his own- decided to broadcast the "captured disk" story is ridiculous. The Pentagon had 48 hours to figure out how they were going to deal with it. The crash happened Thursday, July 3, word was out in the community by Sunday. Amateurs were going to to find the site (some had already) and there would be no containment. The military came up with a winner. Announce that a disk had been captured, (as locals already knew)then immediately announce a completely disappointing counter-story to kill interest. Show the "identified idiot" with ballon parts, as a moron, and all interest in the case dies. This so-called bungled announcement of a capture was actually the cinch pin of the coverup. This was orchectrated by the military from the get go. This implies they had some experience with disks previously. Cape Gipardeau seems a likely candidate.When did the pentagon get the report, who dealt with it, and what is the evidence? No one has looked at the pentagon side of this case.

Since I'm cited as one of the many folks who tried to read this memo, I thought I'd add to this thread.

Fist of all, of the 10 odd image processing techniques used, the most productive was a family of directional filter techniques used to bring out linear details. These rotate through an image section and attempt to enhance different linear structures depending upon the rotation angle selected and the desired feature size, i.e. the length of the side of a letter. Traditionally these are used in ridge following approaches such as fingerprint ridge extraction, but serve well to find boundaries between light and dark boarders of lines. The down side with these techniques is that with enough iterations, they will ALWAYS find a linear structure at some rotation angle. They also fail miserable on curved letters such as "O".

Secondly, various deconvolution techniques were used. The more fruitful ones were FFT models which were tuned to filter feature sizes consistent with our best measurement of typeface width. i.e. if a font line were an average of 8 pixels, an FFT would be selected to filter out structures larger or smaller than that. Since, however, the paper was photographed at an angle, this would only be an average solution good for some letters, but not all.

Contrast enhancement approaches proved rather useless since the film grain at this scale was so large proportionate to the letter size that the film grains would tend to overwhelm the letters.

One very unsuccessful approach was to use a teletype font image map and attempt to subtract each letter in the image from the font type and come up with a best fit. Even the most biased eyes performed better at letter matching that this approach, albeit in the intervening years, there may be some merit to trying a neural net character recognition approach to the memo. Something we had no technology for at the time. The one merit of this approach was that we were able to establish that the teletype did NOT place each letter at the same vertical position. My best guess would be this would have been a ASR-33 teletype, and if you've ever seen output from one of those, you know that linear features and consistent letter strikes are abnormal behavior for this type of machine.

I think with current scan technology, a re-scan of the negatives might prove very instructive, especially if done well above the kell factor size of the smallest film grains. It might be possible to model the film grain and extract that from the background, although I'd hate to be the one to attempt it.

As for the interpretation of the letters and words found. I don't think anyone can approach this without bias, however, subconscious. While I can claim total objectivity in approaches tried in the image processing, I couldn't swear that I had no pre-conceptions in my attempted reading.

Let me at least explain how MY preconceptions biased MY reading, and let that guide others in thinking about the preconceptions of others. I had prior to this analysis attempt, read the MOGUL reports and viewed them as plausible. Look in particular at my interpretations of lines 6, 7 and 8 compared to those of others. My preconceptions would be that MOGUL would have been managed by the Army Air Force (AAF) under direction of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) through their facility at Kirtland Airforce Base in Albuqueraue (ABQ)

Please notice how MY interpretation of these three lines reflects these assumptions. Thus, MY interpretation would substantiate a report of a crashed MOGUL balloon rather than a crashed UFO.

The key point in the above is that even with the best image processing available at the time that we did our analysis, the results of the image processing were so vague that any intelligent person could probably read what they want into the noise. The human mind is a fantastic pattern recognition machine, even when there is no pattern.

Perhaps everyone should consider the obvious - that Ramey knew the telegram was being photographed. Why? Consider that he knew "no one could possible read what's on the telegram" using the technology of his day. However, he thinks that in the future it would be possible. Reason? He sees this as a monumental event in human history that should not be covered up forever.

A number of posts suggest that military personnel are infallible. I know first-hand that this is NOT true, no matter the rank. Most mistakes are small and are not normally noticed by the public.

I think those that make the suggestion Ramey couldn't possibly have made such an error are just plain stupid. Ramey's expression suggests he was flustered, and if you are ever going to make a mistake, right at this point would be the perfect time, as he probably was even shielding his aide from the stuff. He would have been thinking a million things at once, and even Blanchard made the huge mistake of telling the press, did he not? So those like cda who suggest Ramey couldn't possibly have made such an error are just plain naïve, of course people make mistakes, if Hitler didn't make mistakes he would still be alive today and Germany would be ruling the world. How incredibly arrogant therefore to believe the because Ramey couldn't have made such a mistake the whole thing therefore is a farce. So one could then say Blanchard, Ramey, indeed Marcel, and his son, just for starters, are all idiots. One could on the other hand say that these men were all human, all had to made decisions without the benefit of decades of hindsight and pondering as we have, all had to come up with impromptu solutions, and made a number of very human blunders in the process, because they aren't robots. Blanchard first said Yep its a UFO then nope its not, Ramey himself probably didn't even know his own name for that day and so if an histroical mistake was ever going to be made, it was the prime opportunity.